Theatre Review: When We Were Women (Orange Tree)

Abigail Lawrie and Mark Edel-Hunt in When We Were Women (Photo: Ben Broomfield) 

The 2015/2016 Orange Tree season opens with a small but well formed gem: a play of great beauty and subtle power, presented with exceptional delicacy and care. Sharman Macdonald’s When We Were Women premiered at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe back in 1988, but hasn’t had a major production since. Eleanor Rhode’s revival for the OT not only makes a compelling case for this particular text but also leaves you longing to see more of Macdonald’s work on the London stage. (The playwright’s best known plays these days are When I Was A Girl I Used to Scream and Shout and The Winter Guest, filmed by Alan Rickman, with Emma Thompson and Phyllida Law, in 1997.)

When We Were Women unfolds in 1940s Glasgow where Isla - a teenage girl living with her parents, Maggie and Alec, and with two older brothers fighting in the war - meets Mackenzie, a naval officer with a rather mysterious past. The play interweaves two time-lines, separated by a year or so, as it examines the fallout of that encounter and its impact upon the couple, and on Isla’s family. 

With its echoes of several other Scottish plays – notably Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep (1947) and Stewart Conn’s I Didn’t Always Live Here (1973) – the latter memorably revived at the Finborough by Lisa Blair in 2013 [review] – Macdonald’s play finds fresh, idiosyncratic life in a scenario familiar from many a folk ballad: a girl’s seduction by a sailor. On the surface, the play looks like straightforward social realism, but it has its stranger, ghostlier side, and Rhode’s production attends to both elements brilliantly. Macdonald’s dialogue is rooted in the poetry of Glasgow dialect speech but in ways that don’t feel affected or ostentatious, and the play features some striking semi-soliloquies throughout.  

There’s subtle expressionism to this production’s aesthetic, evident in James Turner’s spare set (a kitchen table set upon a wonky, cracked granite floor), David Gregory’s sound design and, especially, Mike Robertson’s outstanding lighting, which picks out the protagonists in surprising shafts of illumination. (This is, without doubt, one of the best, most inventively lighted shows I’ve ever seen at the Orange Tree.) The attention to ambience – which becomes, at times, rather noir-ish – generates surprising intensity, and allows the production to take on the contours of a reminiscence, a misty memory, while at the same time keeping the characters vivid and present, even when their interactions feel tantalisingly ambiguous.

Lorraine Pilkington and Abigail Lawrie in When We Were Women (Photo: Ben Broomfield)

As in much of Macdonald’s work, mother/daughter dynamics are central to When We Were Women, and the scenes between Isla (Abigail Lawrie) and her mother Maggie (Lorraine Pilkington) are particularly strong in their bracing combination of tension and tenderness. Once something of a libertine herself (“mah wild Maggie”, as Alec fondly reminisces), Maggie has, due to circumstance and compromise, gradually settled into an altogether different role. The contradictory messages she sends to her daughter (insisting that a woman must “cleave to her man”  but also “keep things from them, keep a bit of yourself private”) feel exactly judged. It helps that Lawrie and Pilkington are a striking physical match-up, and that the performances of both actresses are exemplary, with Lawrie making a terrific stage debut here following her acclaimed work in the BBC adaptation of The Casual Vacancy.

Steve Nicholson combines bluffness, bullying and beneficence as the hard-drinking patriarch; a late sequence in which he and Maggie outline to Isla their decision about a pivotal matter - the same decision, reached for different reasons - is perfectly played. The cast is completed by Mark Edel-Hunt as the troubled Mackenzie and by Sarah-Jayne Butler as Cath, a significant figure from his past. Both actors have strong, memorable moments. 

There’s nothing remotely modish about When We Were Women and the play’s refusal to milk its premise for more obvious melodrama may disappoint some. But those who do respond to Rhode’s production will find that this very tender, dolorous drama casts a haunting spell.

Booking until 3^rd October. Further information at the Orange Tree website. 

Theatre Review: The Importance of Being Earnest - A New Musical (Riverside Studios)

Arriving so soon after the Rose Theatre’s production, another version of The Importance of Being Earnest may not seem an especially attractive proposition, despite the deep delight that Wilde’s classic comedy is still able to generate. But Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios are presenting an Earnest with a difference: a musicalisation of the play that boasts intriguing novelty-value casting, with Gyles Brandreth - actor, author, presenter and former Tory MP - taking on the role of Lady Bracknell. Directed by the versatile Iqbal Khan, attractively designed by Samal Black, and staged in the cosy confines of Riverside’s Studio 3, the production proves most enjoyable, and strong enough to engage even those viewers who may have felt that they’d had their fill of this particular play for a while.

Despite updating the action to the 1920s, a move that widens the piece's scope in terms of choreography and musical styles, Douglas Livingstone’s book sticks closely to the content and structure of Wilde’s play, offering no major changes or revisionist elements. This, coupled with the melodious but relatively reserved style of Adam McGuinness and Zia Moranne’s piano-centred score, initially makes the evening seem a little tame. Yet after a solid  but somewhat sedate opening, in which Livingstone’s lyrics aren’t always quite Wilde enough, the production kicks into gear in its second half, which is a pure and unadulterated pleasure. Here, responding to the escalating comic complications of the plot, the tunes are stronger and the lyrics more biting and artful, with hilarious duets for those tentative would-be paramours Miss Prism (Susie Blake) and Dr. Chasuble (Edward Petherbridge), and for Cecily (Flora Spencer-Longhurst) and Gwendolyn (Anya Murphy) during their face-off over tea, as well as a nicely-judged nod to the play’s (much-debated) queer subtext in Algernon (Colin Ryan) and Jack (Mark Edel-Hunt)’s bachelor-bromance vaudeville number “On the Spree.”

The performances are thoroughly pleasing, too, with spot-on turns from Edel-Hunt as a very likeable Jack, and from Ryan as a louche Algernon. The chaps are well matched by Anya Murphy’s supremely pert Gwendolen, and by Flora Spencer-Longhurst, glowing and slightly gaga as Cecily. There’s characteristically fine support from veterans Blake and Peterbridge, and wry work from the production’s Musical Director, Stefan Bednarczyk, as the butlers Lane and Merriman. And let’s not forget Brandreth’s striking Queen Mary-modelled Lady Bracknell, a decidedly unfeminine creation with an especially fine line in imperious reactions, and a truly delicious delivery on the sly xenophobe’s ode to avarice “In the Funds.” All in all, a delight. 

The production runs for 2 hours 10 minutes and is booking until 31st December. Further information here.

Theatre Review: Brontë (Richmond Theatre)

Shared Experience’s Brontë was first staged in 2005, in a production directed by the play’s writer Polly Teale. The show now returns in a new, totally re-cast, touring production, helmed by the co-artistic director of Shared Experience, Nancy Meckler. The play follows Teale’s two previous engagements with Brontë-related literature: she adapted Jane Eyre for the stage in 1996 and subsequently wrote a play about Jean Rhys (After Mrs. Rochester), whose Wild Sargasso Sea was of course inspired by Jane Eyre .

Brontë’s focus is the personal and creative lives of Emily, Charlotte and Anne themselves. Unsurprisingly, though, Shared Experience don’t take a traditional or straightforward biographical approach here. Rather, the company brings its distinctive physical and design aesthetic to the show, attempting to enter the inner worlds of the sisters by combining scenes that focus upon their everyday, domestic life with fantasies, memories and dramatised sequences from their novels, constantly blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined. Indeed, the production sets itself up as a subjective investigation into the Brontës’ lives, opening with three contemporary women (Elizabeth Crarer, Kristin Atherton, Flora Nicholson), speculating about how “three Victorian spinsters living in isolation on the Yorkshire Moors” came to write literature of such passion and enduring power. Following this brief prologue, the three women take up their costumes to transform themselves into the sisters and to both dramatise and comment upon their story.

Thus Brontë may be viewed as, in Teale’s terms, “a response to the Brontë story not a piece of biography.” The production’s highly selective and impressionistic approach won’t be to all tastes and there are moments when the show seems to be straining for theatrical effect. The transitions between the sisters’ real and imagined worlds are sometimes marvelously fluid, especially in those scenes that show Emily tenderly interacting with her creation, Cathy (Frances McNamee), from Wuthering Heights. But at other times they’re abrupt and jarring: particularly problematic are the appearances of Jane Eyre’s Bertha (McNamee again) as an endlessly cavorting and gyrating projection of Charlotte’s animalistic id; these scenes feel crude and heavy-handed. The rhythm of the piece is not always satisfying: characters announce their departures only to return again in the next scene, and some sequences – such as Charlotte’s encounter with Heger, the Belgian teacher she loved – seem to come from nowhere. (Heger is played by Stephen Finegold, who, in a psychologically astute bit of multi-casting, also portrays the sisters’ father, Charlotte’s husband, and Rochester in the dramatised Jane Eyre scenes.)

The great strengths of the production lie in its nuanced exploration of the various functions that writing served for the three sisters, and also in its very fine performances. Crarer beautifully invests Emily the tormented genius with a streak of self-reliant strength, and Kristin Atherton’s censorial Charlotte succeeds in generating sympathy against the odds, while Flora Nicholson is vivid as the eager, socially conscious Anne. And Mark Edel-Hunt gives a lively and finally touching account of Branwell, the spoilt brother whose taken-for-granted privileges are criticized by Charlotte in one of the show’s most memorable scenes. The production is also strong on the social context of the sisters’ lives, even as it’s played with a defiantly contemporary attitude that subverts period drama cosiness. Also noteworthy is the atmospheric sound and lighting design by Peter Salem and Chahine Yavroyan

Despite its bitty structure, Brontë proves a rewarding evening overall, with striking moments of beauty and insight that compensate for its more awkward, forced transitions. Often, it’s the quietest moments that resonate most strongly, such as Emily’s subversive appraisal of the sisters’ position: “Perhaps we should be grateful for obscurity. For invisibility. Nothing was expected of us. Whatever we did was our secret, was our own.”

The production runs for 2 hours 30 mins. Further information at the Shared Experience website.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews