Testing The Echo
by David Edgar
Library Theatre Manchester and touring.
I could have sat through this one-hour-forty-five minute, sixty-eight
scene, whistle-stop exploration of the idiocies, intricacies and absurdities of
testing Britishness simply for the pleasure of the acting. Max Stafford-Clark’s
Out Of Joint are superb. David Edgar is equally excellently served by Matthew
Dunster’s intelligent, sensitive and disciplined direction. This is a marvellous
show which combines serious ideas, wit, satire, revue-style nail-on-the-head
almost sketch-like scenes and still manages some subtle characterisation. It’s
the work of a mature dramatist in command of his medium and the writing is pacey,
bracing and attention-holding from start to finish. Its subject, the
straight-from-outer-space lunacy of a definition of what it means to be British
through an arbitrary set of general knowledge type questions, is of course a
symptom of a wider malaise. Christopher Lasch called it the revolt of the
elites. Edgar, in something akin to agitprop technique, closes in on his prey.
In spite of the questions this piece raises, running through its veins is a
beating contempt for the condescension, arrogance, prissiness and sheer
stupidity of the current drive to churn out British citizens like Cowley used to
produce runabouts. There is almost a sense of disbelief in the play’s
conception. And in fact, that such a play needs to be written is a measure of
our contemporary tragedy. Just as this production fills you with delight and
admiration at the skill, commitment, intelligence and imagination of our actors,
so it makes you sick to the pit of your stomach at the time-serving crassness
and dull-witted conservatism of our politicians. This is a play about the crisis
of democracy. It should leave you appalled, angry and wanting to act ( in all
senses).
Edgar enlists the experiences of various characters who, for one reason or
another, want or need to undergo the Britishness test. The very fact of widely
varying motivations undermines the standardising intention. Probably the most
convincingly drawn character is Emma Goodman-Lee, played wonderfully by Teresa
Banham. Emma is an ESOL teacher and Banham renders exquisitely her enthusiastic
competence and lightly worn expertise. She is required to integrate Britishness
into her language teaching, a nice example of how education can be manipulated
to serve ideological ends. Late in the play she finds herself accused of
bullying and discrimination by Nasim, a Muslim who supported the Fatwa against
Salman Rushdie, for what are innocent classroom procedures. Easy-going,
liberal, a product of those post-war values which produced CND, Oxfam, Michael
Foot, Tony Benn, Jack Jones ( the trade unionist, not the singer) even the
you’ve-never-had-it-so-goodism of Harold MacMillan who, reputedly, built
more council houses than Nye Bevan, it’s a lovely and frightening irony she’s
accused by a past supporter of murderous intolerance. Kindred points
are made by Pauline, an articulate, cynical, funny guest at the ESOL
dinner-parties who points up the obvious dubiousness of protesting in the
streets of London against the invasion of Iraq along with a component of radical
Islamists who want to build a society where such protests would be impossible.
It’s a good point, if easily rebutted: the best defences against any form of
tyranny are thoroughly democratic institutions and the rule of law, including
international law. Yet Edgar is right to raise these revealing dilemmas. They
show us how choices are seldom commensurate and the achievement of one desirable
end may require the attenuation of another. Life doesn’t deliver up babyishly
simple choices, which is why a simple test of Britishness is so risible.
At the heart of the play also is Mahmood, a Brummy, who is voluntarily
undergoing cold turkey. This is Britain. This is Britishness. Drugs. Guns.
So-called feral kids. What has this to do with the distance from John O’Groats
to Land’s End ? Mahmood wants to pass the test to avoid difficulties over
property ownership when he goes back to Pakistan. But he’s a junkie. So is this
what it means to be British in 2008 ? In demolishing a single, universal ,
reduced definition of Britishness Edgar reveals what’s really sinister about the
test: it encourages us to see our primary definition in our nationality rather
than our humanity. A national identity which is easily defined isn’t worth
having. We `are human beings first and as such may feel more affinity with
people of our own ilk on the other side of the world, or from a past century,
than with our neighbours. What’s wrong with that? Everyone has to make his or
her own agreement with existence. We do so out of a shared social identity, but
within that identity are many and often very finessed variations. An identity
worth having is one that celebrates the variety which exceeds it.
The identities in this play, Jasminka the Kosovan prostitute, brilliantly played
by the remarkable Farzana Dua Elahe who conveys her coldly manipulative but
lusciously irresistible sensuality with terrifying accuracy (that she doubles as
the child Muna and can switch in a jiffy to vulnerable and charming innocence is
testimony to her versatility), the Ukranian Tetyana, played with consummate
confidence by Kirsty Bushell, also portraying Pauline beautifully, who wants
British citizenship to protect her from being deported if her marriage ( which
she wants to end anyway) is revealed as a sham, Derek, played by the excellent
Robert Gwilym, a red-top reading, football chant barking, typical working man
Brit who revels in his low-level interests and anti-intellectualism, and the
other twenty or so, are inspiringly unalike. Surely it is difference which is
delightful ? What has happened to us as a society, what has happened to our
Britishness that it has become so insular, fearful, inward, withdrawn,
suspicious ? What has happened to us that we need to test people who come to
live here, who bring their difference which should make us rejoice ? This is the
bigger issue adumbrated here. John Berger once remarked that totalitarianism is
characterised by the reduction of reality to the proof of a single idea. We
might also say, by the reduction of identity to the proof of a single test.
Alan Dent
The Children’s Hour
by Lillian Hellman
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester,
5th March – 5th April 2008.
This is a play about the nature of deception: the most effective lie contains
a grain of truth. In its final scenes, it also raises the Kafkaesque spectre:
accusation engenders guilt in the accused. Falsely accused, by a disturbed
pupil, of sexual relations with her colleague Karen Wright, Martha Dobie begins
to wonder if there was some fire behind the smoke. Did she love her fellow
teacher in more than an affectionate sense ? Had the child spotted something ?
Hellman is very astute about the way imputations play on our minds. It is every
bully’s delight to sow the seeds of self-doubt and watch them grow into
self-hatred. In this case, the bully is a child. She is more than a bully, she
is seriously demented. One of those personalities which sees everyone as a mere
extension of itself to be manipulated, she is conscienceless, incapable of
remorse, vicious, cunning and utterly plausible. What has made her so
terrifyingly inhuman ? All we know is that her father killed himself and she is
being raised by her grandmother. Were Mary Tilford an adult, she would be
horrifying. That she is a child makes her thoroughly diabolical. Malicious
accusations against teachers are, of course, commonplace and have ruined may
careers and lives. Few though can have been so coldly calculating, clever and
deadly as this.
Karen and Martha have worked hard to establish their school and have been
running it for eight years. They are committed, kindly, dedicated. Like all
teachers, they can take their role too seriously, but they are noble women. Why
does Mary want to destroy them ? The absence of discernible motive is
disturbing. Mary wants to destroy because she wants to destroy. Her tantrums,
her wild accusations of victimisation are no reason. They are part of the drama
she must always be the centre of. She exists only in crisis. Without a terrible
injustice she’s the recipient of, she’s a cipher. Like all such people, walking
a tightrope over insanity, she is utterly oblivious of the damage she does to
others. Others don’t exist, after all. Mary has control of her peers because of
her willingness to use violence and her clever emotional torture. When a
conversation between the teachers is overheard and over-interpreted by two
girls, Mary seizes her little opportunity and exploits it with all the
wickedness of her perversity. She takes her story to her grandmother. But can’t
the adults deal with this wilful and twisted child ?
Amelia Tilford is a brilliant creation. Faced with her grandchild’s wild
stories, she dismisses her as foolish, self-indulgent, ridiculous. She responds
firmly and without a hint of exaggeration or sentimentality. She is the very
model of a good carer: calm, judicious, able to absorb the hysteria of her ward
and to respond with plain good sense. Any ordinary child would give up in
seconds. But Mary knows her grandmother’s weakness. Like Iago insinuating vile
lies into Othello’s mind, she whispers the devastating rumour to the old woman.
Why does she believe her ? Why doesn’t she dismiss this as readily as the rest ?
Because it is too vile. Because in her own mind are a horrible fear and disgust
which when ignited burn away all her strength and judgement. She acts on her
fears. The results are devastating.
The one man caught in this maelstrom of female machination is Dr Joseph Cardin,
Amelia’s nephew. She summons him. He is appalled at what she has done. He
reviles her. Throughout the play, he remains steady in his love for Karen and
resolutely rational in the midst of rampant irrationality. All the same, his
life is destroyed. The slow working out of the terrible logic of destructive
falsehood, the impotence of truth against the catastrophic hurricane of lies
tinged with plausibility, the dreadful, irresistible attraction of such lies, an
attraction far more compulsive than mere veracity, ensures that all that was
sure becomes doubtful, everything noble, suspect, everything genuine,
questionable. Like The Crucible, this play asks who can speak honestly when a
mania for lies is abroad ? Here, it is a small community wrecked by falsehood,
but why not whole nations, entire civilizations ?
Karen and Martha go to law and lose. How difficult it is to establish our
innocence. Karen notices tiny changes in the way Joe relates to her. That he
might believe the rumours, even for a second, even in some tiny detail,
undermines her trust. Their love goes begging. The school is lost. An
Ibsenite off-stage gunshot puts an end to the tormented Martha. Amelia, too
late, repents her gullibility and seeks to make amends. It is always too late.
The human mind is so constituted it will respond to fabrication so unhinged it
would have no connection to reality, except for that tiny, hard, irreducible
grain of possible truth on which it depends for its effect. The Jews were to
blame for the economic ills of the Weimar Republic ? Dreyfus was a traitor ? The
Zinoviev letter was authentic ? Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ?
The bullies, sociopaths, psychopaths and goons flourish on the tragic fact that
lies are easy to believe, comforting, uplifting. Amelia Tilford begins her
campaign in a spirit of moral certitude and rectitude. Children are being
educated in an atmosphere of corruption ! She is of her time. Lesbianism is
beyond the pale. Sunk in a conventional set of values, as most people most of
the time, she takes them for an over-arching truth and justification. Another
tragic facet of the human mind.
This not usually thought of as Hellman’s best play, but it is real drama and
high tragedy. Its exposure of the frailty of truth and the permanent potential
for vicious lies to hold the public mind is accomplished at the highest artistic
level.
Sarah Frankcom introduces quasi-expressionistic elements into her direction to
overcome some of the difficulties of representing a school. Excellently done.
The whispering pupils surrounding the stage, the beautifully choreographed
suspenseful moments of collective action, are highly intelligent uses and
enhance the sinister undertones. Franckom’s direction of the actors is of the
highest order too. She elicits wonderful performances. Maxine Peake (Karen
Wright) and Charlotte Emmerson (Martha Dodd) appear on television. All to the
good that a wide audience can appreciate them. But their gifts are wasted on
that reaching-down medium: they are both superb, especially in the subtle
modulations of emotion necessary as their worlds fall apart. Kate O’Flynn as
Mary Tilford carries off a remarkable performance. From the moment she comes on
stage, you can’t take your eyes off her. Her Mary is thoroughly obnoxious,
utterly, flesh-creepingly convincing. There is one point when seated and lying
through her teeth, she forces her toes against the floor and arches her feet in
tension: a beautiful metaphor for her inner twistedness and perfectly executed.
Flora Spencer-Longhurst (Rosalie Wells) is also exquisite. Aided by her striking
beauty and brown, innocent eyes as big as plates which convince you she really
is fourteen, she evokes the terrified, shifting, bewildered innocence of a
healthy young girl at the mercy of a monster. If you don’t fall in love with her
you haven’t got a heart. Milo Twomey (Joseph Cardin) is perfect as the brisk,
down-to-earth physician whose confident reason is battered by the lunacy of
murderous tittle-tattle. And at the heart of these performances of international
stature is June Watson (Amelia Tilford). She judges every detail perfectly:
accent, gesture, intonation. This is a thoroughly first-rate performance, acting
of extraordinary poise, grace, intelligence and finesse.
A pity this runs for a mere month.
Alan Dent.
WAITING FOR GODOT by Samuel Beckett
Library Theatre, Manchester.
Beckett is reputed to have remarked that only an Irishman could understand Godot.
Here, Estragon and Vladimir speak with Mancunian accents. Does it alter the
lines ? Probably, because accent is neither superficial nor arbitrary. Imagine
Prince Charles in his best RP saying: Is it your round ? and the same words
being spoken by Wayne Rooney. Is there a change in meaning ? Even if you didn’t
know PC was a royal the “posh” accent implies social status and authority while
the Liverpudlian tends to suggest the opposite. Speaking isn’t just about
denotative meaning and tone of voice makes all the difference. Accent is a
variety of tone of voice and it carries meaning. Try speaking in a “posh” accent
and you’ll find the corners of your mouth pull down ever so slightly. There is a
sneer contained in RP because it’s a class accent. In the same way, there’s a
warmth a friendliness inherent in native Mancunian. It’s an accent forged in
close, working-class communities where mutual support was a cherished value.
Part of the reason middle-class southerners think of northern accents as
gormless is because they contain this emotional tenor of easy-going camaraderie:
it’s not the way go-getters speak. Even an eminently middle-class girl like Joan
Bakewell who hailed from posh Cheshire worked hard to eliminate any trace of the
northern from her speech in order to get on in the media. A Mancunian accent
implies Mancunian attitudes, and in Manchester they vote Labour as naturally as
folk in Reigate toast the queen. I think Beckett intended Gogo and Didi to be
Irish when the play was performed in English. The French version is, of course,
another matter. Some of the lines are distinctly Irish: Get up while I
embrace you isn’t said in Salford. So the accents take something away and part
of it is comedy, for as Irishmen, Gogo and Didi are historically marginalised.
It is natural they should be waiting. Colonised peoples don’t act. Usually, the
play is taken to have no social context: it speaks of existential matters. The
existential tag arose partly because the play was first performed in Paris when
Sartre was the most famous intellectual in Europe and his philosophy was dans le
vent. There is little in the play which speaks of existentialism as a
self-conscious philosophy. Rather, there is regret for lost opportunity ( We
should have done it a million years ago, when we were young. Hand in hand off
the Eiffel Tower. We were respectable then.) and longing for change in a
situation of stasis. Beckett was born in Ireland at time when people still
lived on the road and slept in ditches. The image of Gogo and Didi must have
been implanted young. During the war, Beckett had to flee south to avoid the
Gestapo and worked as an agricultural labourer. Boring work, waiting for the war
to end, the cruelty. And it’s when cruelty makes its entrance in the guise of
Pozzo that this production takes off. Russell Dixon is perfect. He speaks snooty
RP, he is pompous and high-handed, his perfunctory politeness conceals a vicious
character. And he is English. Dressed for the city, for posh milieux, he lords
it over his shabby interlocutors whose dearest wish is a hayloft bed. Pozzo has
cooked food. A chicken leg. Lavish compared to the carrots and turnips Gogo and
Didi exchange and confuse. He throws the bones to his carrier. Pozzo
is distinguished by property. Unlike Gogo and Didi, he doesn’t wait: he
advances. He drives Pozzo. Not his destination but the fact of his going is the
source of his power. Even when he loses his sight he remains in command. He
shortens the rope. Yet as he is driven so he is led. His slave pulls him along.
His property makes him arbitrary and cruel. He has to live up to it. Dixon
captures all this perfectly. Pozzo, like Gogo and Didi is a man doing what he
has to do. He is locked into his fate. He goes on. He drives his slave. They
wait.
The arrival of the boy introduces a curious note. He comes from Godot who is,
therefore, no mysterious, inaccessible force. He brings a message. Godot sends
his apologies. Gogo and Didi are waiting for a real person who is lax in meeting
his promises. Godot employs the boy and his brother. He is a man of at least a
little property. He is violent towards the boy’s brother. Gogo too gets beaten.
Daniel Shaw captures the timidity and bewilderment of the boy excellently. He is
a go-between with a simple message and no answers. Didi takes his frustration
out on him. He sees him as a conduit to Godot. He treats him harshly. On his
second appearance, the boy has to flee ( in the original French comme une fleche
– like an arrow). He is rightly wary of the adults. He is made use of and has to
find his own space.
The famous remark that this is a play in which nothing happens twice is cuter
than it’s accurate. The second act, though almost as long as the first, has the
feeling of an appendix. There are one or two moments where Beckett struggles to
move it along in keeping, perhaps, with one of the most telling lines: Pozzo
declares petulantly, Haven’t you finished tormenting me with your accursed time
(in the French, Vous n’avez pas fini de m’empoisonner avec vos histories de
temps). Beckett, of course, had studied Proust. No doubt he had also absorbed
the 20th century’s relativistic view of time. The old certainty that the onward
march of time leads towards a desired destination and the temporal faith in
progress, or in what Ortega y Gasset called uchronianism, have collapsed. The
result is disorientation. This production captures well the loss and longing of
Didi and Gogo. It’s a good Godot. But those Mancunian accents speak of a warmth
and community at odds with their loneliness in a world of apparently
arbitrary cruelty.
Alan Dent
ROOTS
by Arnold Wesker
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
It’s odd that a play taken to be about working-class life should have been set
amongst a disappearing rural workforce at a time when the industrial
working-class was on the cusp of a period of high influence. This is partly, of
course, to do with the play being drawn from the author’s own experience.
Nevertheless, from a twenty-first century perspective it raises a sense of mild
inappropriateness. Wesker has said the play is about self-discovery and from
that point of view, the class question barely matters. Beattie Bryant’s need to
find her feet is every young person’s and particularly, every young woman’s. Yet
the theme of socialism, of unemployment, of being put on casual labour, of the
bosses responding to every increase in pay with sackings, this theme which
hovers at the edge of the play and bids for a full admission the playwright
denies, tantalizingly suggests that world of car park strike votes, of “wildcat”
actions, of trade union leaders’ tanks on prime ministers’ lawns, which is
remote from the backward rusticity of the play’s setting. Beattie is full
of life, but only because she no longer belongs to this agricultural world whose
slowness, absence of intellectual values, cultural impoverishment and plain
bovine dullness she wants to subvert. She lives in London. She’s in love with
Ronnie, the argumentative culture-loving leftie we never meet but whose ideas
she recycles. She’s experienced the excitement of city life. She wants to
educate her family. She wants the thrill she’s known to enliven their
mud-on-the-boots existence. In this she is attempting the impossible. Perhaps
this is why the play was so unthreatening to even conservative critics. Bernard
Levin called it “this great shining play”. There is a sense that Beattie is
trying to push water uphill. She wants to educate the apparently ineducable, to
bring culture to the resolutely ignorant, to make these poor, exploited folk see
not merely the sense, but the joy of socialism. It’s hopeless. When she speaks
the word “equality”, her brother-in-law jumps up and calls her a communist. To
people like Levin, a play showing the futility of trying to improve the cultural
landscape of the poor and ignorant must have been very reassuring.
Joan Plowright loved the role of Beattie and it is justly remarked that Wesker
created marvellous female roles, the like of which had never been seen on the
English stage. In a sense, this is a one-woman play. It’s almost a monologue
with interventions. Apart from Beattie, who is a remarkable creation, a woman
it’s impossible not to admire and love, only her mother comes into real focus as
a character of significance. It’s between these two the genuine drama is played
out. Yet the battle is very unequal, for Mrs Bryant lives like a horse in a gin.
The best she knows of culture is slushy radio pop. And here is another theme
contesting for space: the condescension and exploitation of a slick, commercial
popular culture which assumes the masses are worth no better and want no better
and so diligently and cynically feeds them superficial, cheap, ephemeral kitsch
which leaves their minds as poor as their pockets. Against this, as against the
cruelty of the exploitation of her father’s labour, Beattie struggles with the
second-hand ideas and the post-war, urban cockiness she has absorbed from
Ronnie. Yet from the very start we know her attempt at transforming her folks’
conditions of life will get nowhere. Dramatically this works excellently, for in
the final, exultant apotheosis in which Beattie at last speaks for herself
we feel that the only possibility for her has been realised. She can escape. She
can leave her rural roots behind and take her place as an articulate and
thinking young woman in the urban culture which will offer her some opportunity.
It’s impossible not to celebrate this. She has triumphed. She has railed against
her lack of roots, the failure of her family and its culture to provide her what
she needed to fulfil the best in her, yet she has found herself. She has done,
in fact, just what the incipient meritocracy of the 1950s prescribed: she has
got out of crippling conditions. The socialism she has embraced postulates
something else: the elimination of those conditions through collective action.
Wesker’s honesty as socialist sympathiser, is to acknowledge that at the time
and in the prevailing circumstances, individual escape was possible but social
transformation a different matter. Had Beattie waited for the revolution, she
would have ended up like her mother.
Dealing naturalistically with the lives of the agricultural poor inevitably
pulls the play into slowness. Its naturalism is excessive: the frying onions of
the opening, the stage business with crockery and tin baths. Claire Brown, a
wonderfully good actress who endows Beattie with exactly the right combination
of exultant expectation and post-adolescent naivety, takes her clothes off for
the bath scene. It’s delicately handled so her dignity is preserved and she’s a
physically delightful young woman; but is such absolute naturalism necessary ?
Wouldn’t it have been easy for her to disappear behind a screen ? The naturalism
distracts. The first two acts suffer from the conventionalism of Wesker’s
conception. He has acknowledged the play is not in the least formally
innovatory. Perhaps it is a little too much of a well-made-play. At the time he
wrote it, the ninety minute drama hadn’t been perfected. Would a dramatist
addressing this material in 2008 write three acts ? The form of the play seems
dated. There are moments in this production when no lines are being spoken and
domestic tasks are being fulfilled in such a naturalistic way you might have
wandered into your neighbour’s kitchen. My guess is modern audiences can fill in
quickly from dramatic hints and the staging needs to take that into account. The
pace of the first two acts is also very slow. Given that everything is driving
to Beattie’s final speech, to her life-enhancing moment of escape both from the
oppression of her family’s narrow horizons and Ronnie’s insistent tutoring,
there is no need for so much insistence on the dim, depressing round that makes
up the Bryant’s life. At one or two moments, you can almost hear Wesker
straining to find the next line. The problem, again, is the naturalism.
Nine-tenths of what is conveyed in conversation is transmitted non-verbally.
When characters exchange banalities, there has to be something significant
behind them. At one or two instants the dialogue comes dangerously close to the
flat transcription of soap-opera.
The Bryant’s lives are impoverished in every way but the terrifying aspect of
the play is their impoverishment of spirit. A decent income will lift them
materially, but how will they rise in other ways. Wesker is straying into some
of the territory of The Uses Of Literacy. He was writing at a turning-point. The
expansion of education, a rising disposable income for the working-class, the
arrival of television in many homes inspired the hope of an improved culture for
the majority. Hope rather than glib historical optimism is where Wesker places
his faith. But the commercial interests weren’t going to miss the opportunity,
and we all know what happened. Historical hindsight imbues the play with a
predictive wisdom: it saw the cultural decline on the horizon and was seeking to
defend against it.
This is a fine production. The qualms about naturalism aren’t a criticism of Jo
Combes’s direction. She gets the best out of an excellent cast, especially
Claire Brown and the remarkable Denise Black as Mrs Bryant whose ability to
reveal how a painfully restricted domestic routine carried through in straitened
and emotionally crippling circumstances can set the limits of a woman’s life is
as stunning as it is heart-rending. David Beames exudes the care-worn exhaustion
of Mr Bryant: when he comes on stage you really believe he has just finished a
hard stint on the farm. Owen Oakeshott conveys the resigned, quiet tragedy of
Jimmy Beales and Caroline Devlin is superb as his accepting wife whose
tolerance, insight and compassion haven’t been crushed by having to cope with
unmarried pregnancy and a loveless marriage. John Cording enlivens his scenes as
the crippled, cynical, drunken Stan Mann whose sense of humour and vigorous love
of life gain the most vulgar expression and Lorna Lewis and Patrick Connolly
provide thoroughly poised support as the exceptionally conventional and
predictable Pearl and Frank Bryant.
Roots occupies a central place in twentieth century British drama. A revival is
always welcome. The flaws in the play don’t prevent it being a landmark, above
all for the character of Beattie. She is magnificent and we could all benefit
from some of her joie de vivre, hope and resilience.
Alan Dent
A CONVERSATION
by David Williamson
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester until 8th December
David Williamson is a prolific Australian dramatist whose work has been well
received in his home country and abroad. His themes focus on the gap between
Australia’s perception of itself as a country of openness, freedom and
opportunity, and the reality of its inequality, violence and unease. A
Conversation is exactly what it says: the play recreates a restorative justice
session in which Derek and Barbara Milsom meet the family of the sociopath, now
in prison and refusing to take part, who has raped and murdered their daughter,
Donna. The purpose of such a session is not to heal all the wounds, but to
permit the aggrieved to gain sufficient purchase on the tragedy for their lives
to regain some degree of worth. Williamson gives us eight characters seated in a
circle and lets the resentments, tensions, grief, anger, bitterness, aggression
but also understanding and compassion play themselves out. It sounds like it
might be dull and hard going but the writing is sufficiently sturdy and the
structure dynamic and subtle enough for it to be compelling. Williamson also
cleverly weaves in the prevailing theoretical views of sociopathic behaviour and
its treatment or punishment. This is potentially perilous in a play but he is
astute enough to undercut the possibility of preaching or parched
philosophising by enlisting the anger or defensiveness of the characters so we
swallow the dry cracker of theory with the rich butter of raw emotion.
The Milsoms are middle-class. Donna has been privately educated. Scott Williams,
the killer, was raised in poverty by a single mother who worked sixty-five hours
a week to provide for her three children. Has Scott been damaged by deprivation
? Yet his sister Gail has turned out well, been to university and has a
high-powered job working for a government minister nor does his brother Mick
show any signs of the unhinged violence Scott was capable of. Coral Williams,
his mother, blames herself. Mick wishes his brother dead. Gail accepts the
horror of his actions but insists there are “factors”. Derek Milsom is consumed
by desire for revenge and wishes the attack Scott has recently suffered in
prison had been fatal. Barbara Milsom feels essentially the same. She and Derek
are splitting up because every time they look at one another they recall the day
of Donna’s murder. Overseeing the meeting is Jack Manning, the facilitator. His
role is relatively reduced. He intervenes only when he must to prevent the
meeting collapsing prematurely. The form of the play ensures that whatever the
preconceptions of the audience, they will find them first confirmed and then
undermined. This happens so quickly is forces you to think through your
responses on the fly and the effect of this is liberating. What you are left
with is the sense of how little we understand, how much we have to learn, how
easily we rest comfortably with unchallenged preconceptions and how tragic are
the results of our complacency. Perhaps the crucial character is Bob Shorter,
Scott’s uncle, the man in his life who let him down by sacking him from his
business after his first offence, by encouraging his macho attitudes, by telling
him, in one of those moments of masculine conspiratorialism that are as common
as they are stupid that “sometimes girls say no when they mean yes”.
What makes the play excellent is Williamson’s skill in raising all the questions
but providing no answers. Finally, he leaves us with the sense that our pity,
though not availing in and of itself, is the best of us.
The acting is of the highest standard all round. Jonathan Hackett conveys
perfectly the distraught bewilderment of the conventional, middle-class Derek
faced with a side of human nature he has never had to confront, except in the
newspapers. Margot Leicester is superb as his bereft wife who makes in the
course of a couple of hours a crucial journey into forgiveness and Susan Twist
gives a truly remarkable performance as Coral Williams, a poor, uneducated woman
who has done the best she can but has been cruelly torn apart by a quirk in her
son’s brain and the violence permeating her culture.
Alan Dent
TRUE LOVE LIES
By Brad
Fraser
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester.
Brad Fraser has a fruitful and enduring relationship with the Royal Exchange and
its most notable director, Braham Murray; the kind of collaboration that is good
for everyone and especially the theatre-goers of the north-west. His plays
usually explore some aspect of homosexual life. This one is no exception but it
also stakes out the territory of the middle-class nuclear family and among the
themes it chips out of the long grass is the destructive culture young people
find themselves trying to build an identity from. Madison and Royce are the
disoriented offspring of Kane and Carolyn, parents so sensitive and intuitive
they smoke dope with their kids as if they’re sharing ice-cream or pancakes.
Royce is a bullied nerd obsessed by the idea of his ugliness who turns out to be
asexual. Madison has to get into bed with every man she meets. Kane had a
homosexual relationship with Dave before he married and when the latter comes
back to town to open a restaurant where Madison tries to get a job a Pandora’s
Box of doubt, suspicion, mistrust, loneliness and recrimination is opened which
destroys just about everything.
Fraser’s dialogue is snappy and bright. The jokes are brilliant and the
structure of the piece masterly. He is an excellent dramatist and this is a
superb little play enhanced by lovely performances by all five of its players.
Jonny Phillips exudes the strenuous physicality of an ageing homosexual
defending himself against the encroaching possibility of neglect. He delivers
his lines with perfect intonation and his comic timing is impeccable. John Kirk
hits exactly the slight inauthenticity of the dutiful pere de famille who
has never quite convinced himself it’s what he should be. Teresa Banham is
remarkable as the busy, up-to-date, keep-up-appearances mother whose world
crashes like bank stocks as the flimsy basis of her emotional investment is
revealed. And Amy Beth Hayes and Oliver Gomm as Madison and Royce simply take
your breath away; young players of such expertise and composure you wonder where
on earth they were trained and how they mastered their skills so completely so
early.
Subtract the homosexual sex and this is a variation on the old theme of sexual
manners. At the heart of the play is a simple assumption: deceit corrodes trust
and trust is essential to all relationships. Fraser is exploring the same
topography as Congreve. And as with the latter, he is astutely aware that sexual
behaviour is culturally mediated. These characters are trying to orientate
themselves in a culture which claims to uphold family values on the one hand
while permitting the most degraded material to be available free on the Web on
the other. Royce surfs to find pictures of David as a porn performer. Why did he
do it ? For the money. Fraser doesn’t labour the point, but pornimagery is
driven by the profit motive. Deregulated capitalism doesn’t merely lift the
restrictions on what bankers can do, it flattens all the barriers which protect
us from the worst in ourselves and presents a social landscape of such
heartbreaking desolation we are lost at the first turn in the weather. “It’s all
just sex,” says one of the characters but Fraser is onto the fact that whatever
your orientation, a demanding ideal which exacts insight, courage and staying
power is indispensable. David accuses Madison of having no “internal sensor”.
Her intrusive bluntness speaks not of confidence and conviction, but of
regression and narcissism. That David is fool enough to fall for her seduction
is indicative of his own confusion and immaturity.
The reduction of sexual experience to mere sensation and the illusion that
sensation can replace the requirement of maturity and its demands is spiked by
Fraser as he whips us through this tragic-comic exploration of the
middle-classes, mapless in a desert of their own creation. When it ends, Kane
and Carolyn’s marriage in is ruins, Royce is drugged to the eyeballs and in
therapy, Madison is as compulsive as ever, Kane is alone and at a loss, David’s
business is failing and the two men share a meal, the first decent food Kane has
a had for months. They are back where they began. The pettiness, the
manipulation, the lying, the refusal to face life’s tough questions has robbed
their lives of meaning. A moral fable for our times, abreast of the superficial
ideologies and the sycophantic cowardice of a corrupt flight from sustaining
values by a self-serving elite, this is a compelling two-hours traffic which
enhances Brad Fraser’s already high and well-deserved reputation.
Alan Dent
OSBORNE’S TAKE ON ENTERTAINMENT STILL ENTERTAINS
THE ENTERTAINER by John Osborne
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
4th November-5th December
First produced at The Royal Court in 1957 under the
direction of Tony Richardson and with Laurence Olivier in the role
of Archie Rice, Osborne’s play famously employs the decline of music
hall as a metaphor for Britain’s changing world status. He thought
of music hall as a “folk art” and considered its decline a loss.
Nevertheless, this Greg Hersov production makes clear the
superficiality and corruption of the entertainment world. Archie,
the struggling comedy, song and dance act, is proud not to have paid
tax for twenty years and his father, Billy, may look back
nostalgically to a more noble epoch, but this comes across as
longing for a mythical Golden Age. Archie brings his work home,
maintaining a strenuous cheerfulness and unceasing attempt at
repartee in the face of domestic agony. He is a serial adulterer who
tramples his wife’s sensitivities, a booze-sodden fantasist unable
to face the truth of his failure. His step-daughter Jean, who
arrives unexpectedly, is in trouble in her relationship with the
higher class Graham, his young son Frank stokes boilers for the NHS
and Mick is away fighting in the Middle East. The background to
Archie’s professional redundancy and the family’s domestic
heartache, is Suez, described by the historian Corelli Barnett as “a
complete folly”. This is Britain at the crossroads and the focussing
of the social and political crisis on a family struggling to
maintain some semblance of unity in the face of atomisation works
well. “I have a go” is Archie’s catchphrase and the sense it conveys
of keeping going in the only way you know how, while the world
around you is changing radically and demanding a new response,
pervades the play. Hersov succeeds in making the play feel
abidingly relevant; the choices facing Britain in 1956 are
essentially those which face us today and the role of entertainment
is still to deflect and comfort. What does comes across powerfully,
however, is how racist attitudes were still respectable at the time
(the characters use derogatory language about ethnic minorities
unthinkingly) and have now been driven to the margins; a nice
example of how social change irresistibly transforms mentalities.
David Schofield is excellent in the role of Archie, bringing exactly
the right quality of pained defeat and fighting upwards. He is well
supported by David Ryall as his father and though Roberat Taylor
captures the downtrodden survivalism of Phoebe, Archie’s wife, she
delivers some of the lines in a slightly too naturalistic manner
which detracts from the dialogue’s demand for stylisation. A young
actor to watch is Oliver Gomm who brings Frank Rice superbly to life
and Laura Rees as Jean is thoroughly in command and riveting. It
would be churlish not to mention Harriet Barrow whose role as the
near-naked Brittania demands only one line but a great deal of
aplomb.
Alan Dent.
