Theatre Review: Springs Eternal (Orange Tree)

Julia Hills and Stuart Fox in Springs Eternal (Photo: Robert Day) 

So here’s a super start to a significant season at Richmond’s Orange Tree. Sam Walters, who ends his remarkable 42 year tenure as artistic director of the theatre next year, opens his final season by directing the rather belated world premiere of a 1943 play by Susan Glaspell. Glaspell (1876-1948) is one of the (many) playwrights whose work the Orange Tree has rediscovered for British audiences; the theatre has produced a number of her plays over the years, the last being a superb take on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Alison’s House back in 2009. Springs Eternal was Glaspell’s last play and one that, for a variety of reasons, slipped through the net. It turns out to be an intriguing, character-rich piece whose humour and humanity Walters’s deft, sensitive production brings beautifully to the fore.

The play is concerned with exploring different attitudes to World War II and, in particular, generational splits and schisms in relation to the conflict. It unfolds in the boho New York State household of one Owen Higgenbothem (Stuart Fox), an academic who, some years previously, wrote a book entitled The World of Tomorrow which set out his idealistic vision of the future. Bitterly disillusioned by the advent of war, Higgenbothem has retreated into a comfortable kind of cynicism that impacts upon those around him, from his second wife Margaret (Julia Hills) to his son Harold (Jeremy Lloyd) to his housekeeper Mrs. Soames (Auriol Smith) whose own son, Freddie, is fighting in the Pacific.

Glaspell clutters her scenario a tad - there’s an apparent aborted elopement and some complicated family dynamics that take some working out – and she clearly enjoys her characters’ interactions so much that she’s occasionally a bit indulgent with them; in particular, some windy musings in the second half could have been snipped. But gradually the drama’s concerns come into focus. Quirkier in tone than much of Glaspell’s work, the writing here sometimes has the wonderful loopy lyricism of a John Guare. “He has made my love ridiculous!” wails one character, to which another replies: “He didn’t mean to. He has the flu”, and the actors clearly relish the original opportunities provided for them.

Indeed, the production boast several performances that it’s worth travelling many miles to see. Julia Hills is terrifically sympathetic as the put-upon Margaret; a fierce late scene in which she expresses her feelings of anger and resentment at Owen’s attitude proves a pivotal moment. Miranda Foster does a delicious gem of a comic performance as his slightly batty first wife, whether moved by her own memoirs or pausing, apropos of nothing, to muse: “Why haven’t I seen more of Africa?” Rosy-cheeked Jeremy Lloyd is adorably earnest as the self-reliant conscientious objector son dealing with his father’s disappointment and disdain. And Auriol Smith works wonders as the house-keeper whose common sense pronouncements cut through the intellectual posturing of her employer. This isn’t Glaspell’s most perfectly constructed work, but Walters’s production makes it an exquisite, involving evening overall.

The production is booking until 19th October.

Theatre Review: The Breadwinner (Orange Tree)



Cate Debenham-Taylor in The Breadwinner (Photo: Robert Day)



"Well, I’m dished!" The Orange Tree’s mini-season of plays on the subject of breadwinners and providers concludes with a spry final offering: Auriol Smith’s enjoyable revival of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1930 comedy. There’s been a pleasingly radical streak to each of the early 20th C plays presented in this season, especially in their engagement with issues of gender and economics. Githa Sowerby’s The Stepmother critiqued patriarchal control of the purse-strings by showing the hard-working efforts of its enterprising heroine being systematically undermined by a no-good spouse. And GB Stern’s intriguingly conflicted The Man Who Pays The Piper advanced the proposition that a woman’s ultimate fulfillment might lie in the business world rather than in the domestic sphere. Though consistently lighter in tone than those texts, and much more condensed in its time-frame, Maugham’s play also offers a bracingly oppositional perspective on the way in which “money matters” in familial relationships - and on much else besides. That the play intersects beautifully with the two previous productions in the season isn’t a surprise. But it also proves a neat complement to Matthew Dunster’s creamy revival of Rodney Ackland’s Before The Party, currently at the Almeida and based, of course, on a Maugham short story.

Like Before The Party, The Breadwinner also skewers the shallow, status-obsessed mind-set of its spoilt middle-class protagonists and traces the fallout of one rebellious family member’s flouting of expectations. In this case, it’s the father of the family, one Charles Battle (Ian Targett), who stirs up his Golders Green clan when he announces that, following a serious spot of financial bother, he’s turning his back on the daily grind of the stock-broking world - and leaving the family, to boot. It’s a premise that might be played for hand-wringing melodrama. But as Charles’s wife Margery (Cate Debenham-Taylor) and his self-absorbed teenage kids Patrick (Joseph Radcliffe) and Judy (Nathalie Buscombe) register their objections it’s made clear that they’re more troubled by the possibility of scandal and the fact that Charles’s absence might deprive them of their creature comforts than by much emotional attachment to Daddy Dear.

Maugham can be a slyly subversive writer at the best of times (witness his euthanasia-endorsing The Sacred Flame, revived by Dunster for ETT last year) and in The Breadwinner he inserts a still-relevant critique of matrimony and materialism into an apparently well-behaved drawing-room comedy. Witheringly cynical about marriage, provocative on parent/child perceptions and insightful about the effects of WWI on gender roles and family relationships, the play’s jibes aren’t always subtle but they are well-aimed, and there’s a decidedly serious undertow to the demonstration that conventional family roles and the business world can stifle the spirit. Whether Maugham had been reading his Emerson when composing The Breadwinner I’m not sure but there’s surely a trace of Transcendentalism to the drama’s insistence that the individual must be allowed to develop beyond oppressive social contracts and conventions. In this way, Maugham’s Charles might be viewed as the more genteel English forebear of American Beauty’s Lester Burnham, as he espouses a philosophy of self-reliance and starts telling his loved ones some long-repressed home truths. And seldom can a male protagonist’s desire to abandon his family have been presented more sympathetically than it is here.



Nathalie Buscombe in The Breadwinner (Photo: Robert Day)



Designed with customary precision and economy by Sam Dowson, Smith’s production might benefit from a little tightening: a couple of performances still lack a bit of definition and not all of the lines generate the laughs they should. But the production is entertaining throughout and boasts several spiffing turns. Ian Targett warms up as Charles to give both poignancy and insight to his portrayal of an apparently humourless man’s bid for freedom. As the spoilt son who believes a hardcourt tennis court to be “one of the ordinary necessities of existence” Joseph Radcliffe puffs up with hilarious indignation at his father’s dismissal of him as “boring.” Cate Debenham-Taylor brings wonderfully subtle comic skill to her characterisation of the aesthete wife who’s contemplating extra-marital dalliances but is none-too-keen on the idea of being dumped. The Harriet Walter-esque Isla Carter gets a show-stopping vamp moment. And the appealing Nathalie Buscombe starts archly but softens into sympathy as the only family member to come round to the pater’s point-of-view.

Booking until 18th May. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: Sauce for the Goose (Orange Tree)



Photo: Robert Day



If it’s Christmas at the Orange Tree, then it must be (doorless!) farce. And if it’s farce, then it must be Feydeau. Well, not necessarily, in fact, for the OT have looked beyond the repertoire of France’s principal farceur in recent years, with Hennequin and Delacour’s Once Bitten in 2010 and – best of all – the English writer John Maddison Morton’s Three Farces in 2011. But for this year Sam Walters and company have returned to Feydeau and the playwright’s 1896 play Le Dindon (The Turkey/Sauce for the Goose), which the theatre first staged in 1987. Those of us who hold none-too-fond memories of Richard Eyre’s misbegotten revival of A Flea in Her Ear a couple of years ago might flinch at the prospect of more Feydeau even now. And I can’t say that Walters’s production entirely assuaged my doubts about the validity of the playwright’s eminence. Still, though overlong, it’s a considerably more attractive proposition than was Eyre’s Flea with a few comic high spots and some finely orchestrated moments of mania.

The plot centres - no surprise here - on frustrated philanderings. Pontagnac (David Antrobus) pursues Lucienne (Beth Cordingly) who turns out to be the wife of his old friend Vatelin (Stuart Fox). Lucienne has an admirer in the reprobate Redillon, but is refusing his advances as long as her husband is faithful to her. It turns out that he hasn’t been, though, and the arrival of Vatelin’s strident German lover Heidi (Rebecca Egan) and her effusive spouse Soldignac (Jonathan Tafler) gives the plot a much-needed fillip, with all of the characters ending up at the Hotel Ultimus, where the guests include an army doctor Pinchard (Vincent Brimble) and his deaf wife (Auriol Smith). A cup of strychnine and an alarmed bed add to the larks.

The structure of Sauce for the Goose adheres to what appears to be the Feydeau formula: a laboured set-up, a manic middle, a let-down end. As in Flea, the targets often seem questionable and those with a low tolerance for funny foreigner gags and disability-mocking (a speech impediment in Flea; deafness here) would be well advised to steer clear. But although Walters’s production would benefit from tightening and tweaking – at an hour and forty five minutes, the first half is way too long, for starters – it has enjoyable moments throughout. Indeed, it’s some of the least promising elements that actually prove the funniest: I laughed the hardest at the German characters and at the Pinchards’s exploits - with Egan and Tafler, Brimble and Smith, delivering perfectly pitched performances in each case.

Indeed, most of Walters’s cast – many of them fresh from Antrobus’s production of Ibsen’s Love's Comedy - acquit themselves well, and Peter Meyer’s translation is spry line by line (a quibble on “dogging” and “hounding” is especially choice). For me, though, Feydeau’s plays lack charm and insight and are never as intricately or cleverly worked out as their reputation would suggest. Sauce for the Goose proves a pleasant enough diversion and the audience certainly seemed to be having a good time throughout, but it’s not an evening to convert the farce averse.

Booking until 2nd February. Further information at the Orange Tree website.