All entries for February 2007

Pinter's People (Theatre Royal Haymarket) and The Dumb Waiter (Trafalgar Studios)

TAKE A LESSON FROM LEE, MR. BAILEY

Two consecutive evenings of Pinter as well as writing about him since September for a dissertation would suggest a serious Pinter overdose. However, seeing Pinter’s People, a collection of his sketches and monologues, last night followed by The Dumb Waiter tonight has only served to shed even more light on the dark and elusive talent that is Harold Pinter.

Bill Bailey is obviously the crowd-puller for the Haymarket’s rather obscure production of Pinter’s bizarre and disappointingly prosaic skits. With a cast of four performing fourteen sketches, it’s a pretty poor show. The famous “Pinter pause” is stretched to such limits that I find myself admiring the ornate gold leaf on the ceiling of the Haymarket.

The piece lacks, firstly, drama and, secondly, laughs. Subsequently, it inhabits this rather bland, boring middle-ground where the repetitiveness of the dialogue just gets irritating, and you wish you could watch the whole thing on fast-forward. There isn’t the justice done to real-life that Pinter’s drama lends itself to so well, and each actor makes of his part a rather clumsy caricature. Kevin Eldon is consistently highly-strung, delivering his dialogue as if he were making a 999 call. Bill Bailey is moderately funny as the cab driver in Victoria Station, but after several sketches you realise that he acts with two things only – his gaze and his gob. Sally Phillips deserves a special mention for her superb monologue, Tess, as she recounts a rather gruelling story, plunging from devilish giggles, as she claws at her skirt, to wild hysteria. Geraldine McNulty, again, has moments of comedy on a park bench, but generally just approaches the humour with a mallet.

The Dumb Waiter, on the other hand, with a cast consisting of Lee Evans and Jason Isaacs, is possibly the best piece of theatre in London at the moment. Pinter’s hilarious, thrilling two-hander is executed perfectly in Harry Burton’s tight production. Evans gives a performance of the year as the exasperated, vulnerable Gus, and with eyes like saucers, lumbers around the stage, head lolling heavily between his rounded shoulders, like an adolescent primate.

There is side-splitting comedy as the edible, scabby contents of Gus’s bag are sent up in the dumb waiter to a mysterious receiver, and also moments of chilling horror as Ben towers over Gus, fist clenched, the speaking tube swinging ominously from its connection. While Evans plays Gus as delightfully human, handling the comedy delicately, Isaacs perhaps has the harder job of the sullen, harshly-spoken Ben. A great performance, however, as he highlights his character’s sheepishness that peeps out from behind the stern façade.

What a double-act and what a show. The set, with its damp-stained wall tiles, rusty bed-frames, sweat-stained linen and the gaping column of nothingness in which the dumb waiter clunks up and down, is so evocative you can almost smell the stale piss. It complements what is one of the most absorbing 55 minutes of drama you will see for a while.

Admittedly, Pinter has given a lot more care to his writing of The Dumb Waiter than to his seemingly more haphazard review sketches. Yet Evans and Isaacs, under the direction of Harry Burton, show an intelligent understanding of Pinter’s drama. The menace of the pauses creates your very own dumb waiter in the pit of your stomach. The closest Pinter’s People gets to a physical reaction is a gentle tickle under the chin.

Anna Brewer : 13 Feb 2007 23:02 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Comfort Me With Apples, Hampstead Touring Theatre, Warwick Arts Centre

COMFORT ME WITH APPLES AND WITH BLOODY GOOD DRAMA

As a mere handful of old people trickled into Warwick Arts Centre, I wondered if I’d made the right decision coming to see this play. Whether the diminished audience was down to the title making it sound more like a harvest festival appeal for Help the Aged, or whether it’s just that Nell Leyshon’s relatively young play has yet to become known, I’m not sure. Give it a few years, however, and this delightful play deserves the status of a classic.

Having recently seen Frank McGuinness’s Gypsy at the Almeida, I was unsure as to whether I could hack another family drama that involved coming to terms with a death. In this instance, the sudden death of the father brings the daughter and family friend home after a mysterious three-year absence. As the family dig the orchard in an attempt to maintain the father’s farm, what’s really unearthed are unwelcome blasts from the past.

There is no melodrama in this play; it shows a family death scenario at its most raw. We see a set of characters whose very nerves are ragged and whose growth has somehow been stunted (Len the brother is simple, Brenda the daughter, infertile, Linda the friend with an aborted baby and Roy the son, in a Godot-like fashion, unable to go anywhere). This is a family, therefore, carrying bitter grudges, and as the mother Irene (played superbly by Veronica Roberts) taunts every one of them for the very flaws she is responsible for, we witness these characters come dangerously close to breaking point.

Irene shows us the crushing influence of the matriarch on a family, as she attempts to drive all other women from her son and rejects his twin sister saying, “But I didn’t want a girl!” With furrowed brow, eyes stubbornly fixed on the ground and her tree-trunk legs planted in wellies, Irene wallows in extreme self-pity. “But I didn’t sleep well last night!” Dangerous desires run underneath the generally innocuous dialogue, with the mother’s unhealthy idolatory of her son and the extremely powerful ending as she begins to strip the retarded Len and they lie side-by-side, covered in leaves and recounting the tale of the Apple Tree Man.

It’s a powerful play in the sense that people come so tantalisingly close to resolution. Linda and Roy nearly rekindle their love affair, Irene is on the brink of accepting her daughter back, Brenda almost tells Roy that Linda has another man. But it is as if each character has a physical and metaphorical fortress around them, and dialogue and contact is guarded and mostly blocked. The truth is steered away from like a car on a cliff-edge and Len, as the equivalent of the Shakespearean fool, is the only one that ever dares speak it. “Leave it, Len” seems the catchphrase that runs through this play.

Alongside Veronica Roberts, there are four other equally strong performances. Graham Turner as the wholly loveable Len gurgles with the simple pleasure of collecting up apples and mischeviously eating biscuits. Penny Layden and Lisa Stevenson play the two young women as stark contrasts – Layden as the stately, iron-willed Brenda and Stevenson as the goofy and touchingly sincere Linda. Jonathan McGuinness plays Roy as passive and simply numbed to any real feeling.

As more and more apples thud onto the stage, shocking family secrets are revealed and we get nostalgic glimpses into the rosier past. The father’s death is pushed to one side and the sole issue becomes the family’s present and desperate need for survival and some quality of life.

Comfort Me With Apples, directed by Lucy Bailey, is doing a national tour until the end of March.

Anna Brewer : 09 Feb 2007 10:17 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

There Came A Gypsy Riding, Almeida Theatre

THERE CAME A GYPSY RIDING (BUT WHERE’S THE GYPSY?)

Gone are the days of Sean O’Casey, Sebastian Barry or Brian Friel when Irish drama involved fireside chats, folk ballads and patriotic characters fighting to preserve a dying Ireland. Now Frank McGuinness (creator of the highly successful Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and more recently Speaking Like Magpies) has written a contemporary soap-opera of a play in which the “f”-word appears more than “Ireland”.

There Came A Gypsy Riding is currently playing at the Almeida under the direction of Michael Attenborough, starring Eileen Atkins and Imelda Staunton. A world premiere, there is nothing of the rosy romanticism implied in the play’s title, and instead we witness a family trying to come to terms with the suicide of the nineteen-year-old son two years prior.

It’s a disappointingly poor script for such a gifted writer; the humour is lumpy and the dialogue annoyingly didactic and repetitive. Don’t bother keeping a tally chart of all the times each character says, “But he’s dead” or something to that effect. All three acts deal with the family coming to terms with this and there’s an awful lot of shouting, screaming and melodrama en route.

Imelda Staunton gives a strong performance as the mother, but has a cringe-worthy mad scene in which she stands on rocks and appeals to the birds, mountains, sea and sky to tell her why her son killed himself. While the other characters wipe away tears and tug at their hair, I feel decidedly unmoved and unaffected by what I am seeing.

The dull domestic drama is punctuated at points by the arrival of Bridget – the mad, cynical neighbour who thrives on bad news. With her wispy grey hair, pop socks and makeshift zimmer, Bridget scoots along uttering the most profound obscenities. These jarring words seem absurd coming from the mouth of a lady in her nineties, cut off from society. It’s a blue-rinse using blue language as she tells characters to “f*** off” and refers to most women as “bitches”. Atkins also just looks a little bit too aware of her pulling power over the audience in her overly wry, wacky portrayal of the old woman.

The other performances are sound, but there is limited scope for anything exceptional. There’s a lot of dramatic pacing of the stage and characters losing their rag, as each deals selfishly, not with the death, but by how it’s affected them. The daughter (Elaine Cassidy) compares it to dealing with an autistic child in her class, the brother (Aidan McArdle) has a rant at dinner and the father (Ian McElhinney) has a rather prolonged blubber over tea. It’s only Bridget that doesn’t get her moment and that’s because she’s too busy reminding us (just in the danger that we might forget) that the son is actually….dead.

With an overly supportive audience who gasp audibly at the horribly predictable plot twists and applaud the most crass jokes, I sit wondering if I am just a world-class party pooper. But Frank McGuinness’s play is decidedly disappointing – the equivalent of an Irish Coronation Street. As the family dwell on the son’s suicide, you contemplate asking them why they don’t all do it and put us out of our misery.

Anna Brewer : 07 Feb 2007 18:01 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem