Theatre Review: The Stepmother (Orange Tree)

There’s a decidedly feminist bent to the opening of the 2013 Orange Tree season, which begins with two cross-cast, seldom-seen dramas exploring women’s lot in early 20th century England. First off the blocks is Sam Walters’s deft, intelligent production of Githa Sowerby’s 1924 play The Stepmother – a timely choice given that Northern Broadsides’s take on Sowerby’s best-known play, Rutherford and Son, is currently doing the touring rounds. Formally conventional, with echoes of Granville Barker, Galsworthy and Pinero, Sowerby’s play focuses on Lois, a twentysomething stepmother to two grown-up girls, Monica and Betty, who runs a successful dress-making business. The fly in the ointment for the hard-working Lois is her much-older spouse, Eustace Gaydon, an unmerry widower who married Lois for an inheritance that he’d expected to come to him, the bulk of which he’s now frittered away in shady business deals. The crunch comes when Lois – unaware of her husband’s actions – pledges a whopping £10,000 “settlement” for Monica’s wedding, and the self-justifying and blame-apportioning Eustace is forced to fess up to his dodgy dealings.

The Stepmother genuinely deserves the title of “rediscovery,” for Walters’s production is in fact the professional premiere of Sowerby’s play, which had one private performance in 1924 and hasn’t been staged since. While the piece certainly deserved a better fate than that, it’s not entirely unclear why it’s been neglected: there are occasional lags and flags of interest in the drama, some sketchy characterisation and - after an absolutely superb opening scene in which we see Eustace beginning his campaign of manipulation against the vulnerable, orphaned Lois - the play sometimes struggles to sustain sufficient intensity; a rather English mildness, even a triviality, sometimes settles on the piece. At its best, though, Sowerby’s writing has both bite and insight, and its demonstration that a married woman’s financial security can be entirely undermined by the husband who’s actually controlling the purse-strings certainly resonates. (As does the play’s gentle subversion of the “wicked stepmother” archetype.) In addition, the play connects nicely with previous Orange Tree productions dealing with marriage and inheritance, in particular Susan Glaspell’s Allison’s House, Allan Monkhouse’s Mary Broome, and Pinero’s The Thunderbolt.

A skilful cast also help to fill out some of the gaps. The gorgeous-voiced Christopher Ravenscroft – an actor it’s generally difficult to dislike (see here and here) – slyly subverts his natural charm as the useless, scheming Eustace; never can the assurance “we’re married people – what’s yours is mine” have rung more sinisterly. Julia Watson sketches an indelible portrait of elderly befuddlement as Eustace’s ailing aunt, and Jennifer Higham and Emily Tucker are lovely, lively presences as the daughters. And playing the multi-tasking, manipulated heroine, the radiant, sympathetic Katie McGuinness (formerly Mary Broome) conveys both innocence and tenacity, as Lois slowly realises what another character articulates: that, when it comes to apparent affairs of the heart, in one way or another it’s actually “the money that matters.”

The production runs until 9th March. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: Muswell Hill (Orange Tree Theatre)

Muswell Hill is the third play by Torben Betts to be staged at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre in the last 11 years. I missed the first, Clockwatching, in 2001 but did catch the second, The Company Man, in 2010 [review here], and found it to be an uneven but sometimes very beautiful family drama that was most memorable, in Adam Barnard’s production, for a staggering performance by Isla Blair that didn’t receive anything like the acclaim that it deserved. Directed by Sam Walters, Betts’s new play is less structurally ambitious than The Company Man, and without a central performance to equal Blair’s. But it’s a more focused and consistent piece of work, and one that offers some considerable pleasures.

The drama unfolds on a nicely-detailed kitchen set by Robyn Wilson (one which recent Bush Theatre attendees will have fun comparing to those in The Kitchen Sink and Our New Girl) in the North London flat of a young couple, Mat (Leon Ockenden) and Jess (Jasmine Hyde), who are hosting a dinner party. Those attending are two garrulous chums of the couple - the twitchy firebrand Simon (Dan Starkey) and the pernickety widow Karen (Katie Hayes) - and Jess’s adopted sister Annie (Tala Gouveia), an aspiring (and, it emerges, none-too-talented) actress/singer who brings along her fiance, the much older Tony (Timothy Block), an oily and pretentious theatre director who’s teaching Annie “all about Shakespeare. And David Hare.” It’s the 13th January 2010, and news of the Haiti earthquake is filtering through on the group’s iPhones and on Mat’s ever-present laptop. And as the wine flows freely, tensions and anxieties predictably begin to surface, as it emerges that the assembled company are all, in one way or another, dissatisfied or disappointed with the direction of their lives.

It’s an exceedingly familiar - even shopworn - dramatic set-up that Betts has resorted to here, and the spirits of Alan Ayckbourn and, especially, Mike Leigh loom a little too largely for comfort at times. Betts’s play may also put those who saw it in mind of David Lewis’s How To Be Happy, which was staged at the Orange Tree last November, and boasted similarly sharp humour and a final melancholy twist, and which also attempted to place middle-class malaise in the context of wider global and political concerns.

I liked How To Be Happy better than Muswell Hill overall, and not only for its musical selections (though Schubert and The Ronettes beat Mozart and Norah Jones in my book). But in spite of its derivativeness, Betts’s play still has much to recommend it. In particular, it brilliantly skewers the oddities of contemporary communication and a world in which global news stories form a mere “backdrop” to domestic travails. The characters squint and jab at their iPhones, responding to the events unfolding in Haiti with knee-jerk, superficial sympathy, and often only half-heartedly engaging with those who are physically present. In this atmosphere, the often ghastly and pedantic Simon’s rants against the state of the world - which culminate in a startling tirade against his hosts - gain a certain piquancy and force. When he exhorts those assembled to “riot, riot, riot!” there’s a collective in-take of breath in the auditorium.

A strength of Betts’s writing is its even-handedness. His characters are drawn in more than one dimension: he doesn’t dash to demonise them, and instead allows the audience’s sympathies to shift throughout. (I must admit that I failed to warm to Ockenden’s Mat at any point, though whether that’s due to Betts’s characterisation or the actor’s interpretation is difficult to judge.) But Gouveia, Hayes, Block and Starkey pitch their performances perfectly, while Jasmine Hyde beautifully and understatedly conveys the discontent that has led Jess to become involved with another man. The quality of these performances and the sharpness of Betts’s writing at its best make for a witty and perceptive evening that gets the Orange Tree’s spring season off to a sprightly start.

Note: I’d recommend a pre-show supper for this one, since the monkfish stew smells very, very good.

Muswell Hill is booking until 10th March. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: The Conspirators (Orange Tree Theatre)

Václav Havel has a long association with the Orange Tree. The theatre mounted its first production by the Czech writer and erstwhile president in the late 1970s and has gone on to stage a range of his plays, including several premieres, in the ensuing years. It’s appropriate, then, that the theatre’s 40th anniversary season should commence with a play by Havel: in this case, a 1971 work here receiving its first-ever British production. The Conspirators was the first play that Havel wrote as a “banned” playwright, following the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet forces, and it takes as its focus the complexities and ironies of a post-Revolutionary period.

Set in an unspecified country, the piece opens following the fall of the brutal dictatorship of one General Olah. The situation is a precarious one: the arrest of the new Prime Minister’s Permanent Secretary, Stein (Alister Cameron), who’s accused of being a “fanatical follower of the dictatorship,” has led to student demonstrations, and the fledgling democracy is already looking decidedly fragile. With rumours rife that Olah is in fact still alive, and preparing to mobilise his supporters, a concerned group made up of the State Prosecutor (Christopher Ravenscroft), Major Ofir (Paul Gilmore), the Head of Censorship (Kieron Jecchinis), the Chief of Police, Colonel Moher (David Rintoul), and the wealthy widow Helga (Lucy Tregear) meet to discuss their options. Their decision to set up a Revolutionary Council leads to its own set of problems, however, not least the pressing question of who will be its chairman.

The premise might suggest an evening of worthy-but-dull political debate, but the mischievous Havel has a few delightful tricks up his sleeve. He’s a writer who’s unafraid of sharp changes in tone, and his anarchic humour - not all of it exactly highbrow - erupts at the most unexpected of moments. Energetic injections of farce (plus some rather unexpected S&M encounters) punctuate the political machinations, and the production gets funnier as it goes along, with running gags and repetitions adding up to some priceless comic moments in the second half. Aided by a strong translation by Tomas Rychetsky and Carol Rocamora, Sam Walters’s production proves thoroughly adept at navigating these shifts in mood. The approach is sometimes heavy-handed - Vincent Brimble’s Prime Minister praises the country’s prison system as we listen to the sounds of a man being tortured, for example - but the occasional lapses of taste and subtlety generate their own meaning and momentum. While some may quibble with the lack of specific context - the production certainly invites us to “insert contemporary parallel here” - Havel’s approach avoids getting the play bogged down in historical data, instead allowing us to ponder the tensions and paradoxes inherent in any post-Revolutionary situation. The playwright piles irony upon irony as the manipulations and betrayals mount up.

The production also benefits from the sterling efforts of its large cast. Paul Gilmore and Kieron Jecchinis deliver wonderfully funny performances as the mild-mannered Major and the silly Censor respectively, while David Rintoul makes a strong impression as the bullish, whip-wielding Colonel. Lucy Treager is also good value as the manipulative Helga, a woman who swaps sexual partners and allegiances with hilarious rapidity. Best of all, though, is Christopher Ravenscroft, as the ageing, disappointed Prosecutor, frustrated with his “homebody” wife (Claire Vousden) and lusting hopelessly after his secretary (Mona Goodwin). The role could simply result in a crude caricature of a performance but Ravenscroft invests it with his customary sensitivity and nuance; he’s an actor who seems to bring a touch of soulfulness to every part he plays.

At times it seems that Havel doesn’t quite have his material entirely in his grasp. Some promising roles and plot-lines sadly go to waste - I expected to see more of James Corscadden and Jill McAusland as Helga’s son and niece, for one. And the rather abrupt ending lacks a bit of punch and definition. The quirkiness of The Conspirators may not be to all tastes, but this is a lively and thought-provoking evening that gets the Orange Tree’s 40th season off to an excellent start.

The production runs for 2 hours 25 minutes and is booking until 1st October. Further information at the Orange Tree website.