Theatre Review: The Handyman (Richmond Theatre & touring)

Belying the excessive modesty of its title, Ronald Harwood’s play The Handyman deals in Big Themes: war crimes, guilt, retribution, the nature of evil, the unknowability of others. You won’t be able to miss these themes because the characters keep stopping to announce them. A tendency towards obvious speechifying gives Harwood’s play an artificial air, at times. But Joe Harmston’s crisp and uncluttered production, produced by Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre and now touring, proves mostly gripping nonetheless.

The play – which was first staged at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre in 1996 – opens in the quintessentially English (cue birdsong and church bells) garden of an affluent couple, Julian and Cressida Field (Adrian Lukis and Caroline Langrishe): she’s working towards a degree in Gender Studies; he’s “in money.” The pair employ an odd-job man, Roman Kozachenko, known as Romka (Timothy West), a Ukrainian who’s taken care of the family for years, since being befriended by Cressida’s father in a P.O.W camp in Rimini. One day, however, the Fields receive a visit from Scotland Yard who announce that they have evidence connecting Romka to the massacre of over 800 Jews in the Ukraine in 1941. Romka protests his innocence, insisting that he was only a cook in the army and that this is a case of mistaken identity, but as evidence against him begins to mount up, the Fields begin to question how well they know a man that they’ve loved and trusted for years. Or as Julian handily summarises: “How well does anyone ever really know anyone?”

Its premise not entirely dissimilar to that of Costa-Gavras’s 1989 film Music Box, in which Jessica Lange played a lawyer defending her Hungarian father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) against accusations of war crimes, The Handyman stays out of the courtroom. Rather, the piece moves between scenes set in the Fields’s garden – where the couple meet Romka’s lawyer Marian Stone (Carolyn Backhouse) – and others set in Scotland Yard, where Romka is questioned by two police officers (James Simmons and Anthony Houghton). The latter scenes prove to be the most memorable and effective in the piece, and not only because Harmston has managed to entice to two big-names to portray witnesses to Romka’s alleged crimes. Delivering their testimonies via video, Steven Berkoff and Vanessa Redgrave – playing an army comrade of Romka’s and a friend of his sister, respectively – give juicy life to the play’s sometimes rehearsed-sounding arguments, and their star power doesn’t throw the evening off balance. Redgrave, in particular, lifts the piece into another dimension as her character, now a nun in Jerusalem, recalls witnessing a massacre. Unfortunately, the tension generated in these scenes is somewhat spoiled by a plunge into soap operatics in the misjudged final scene – an episode not in the original production of the play and added, Harwood’s programme note informs us, at the suggestion of Christopher Fry.

As the complacent couple who find their comfortable world shaken, Lukis and Langrishe give solid though not outstanding performances. West is superb throughout, however, creating a portrait of a softly-spoken man who’s severed all links with his background to re-invent himself as a British citizen and now finds his past painfully resurfacing. The intelligence of West’s interpretation, and the strength of the interrogation scenes, make Harmston’s production a worthwhile and intermittently powerful experience.

At Richmond until 20th Oct. Further touring information here.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.

Theatre Review: How To Be Happy (Orange Tree Theatre)

Two households, both with the same settee. A settee that gets lolled on, cried on, argued on, walked on and shagged on over the course of David Lewis’s lively and thoughtful new play at Richmond’s Orange Tree. Directed by its author, How To Be Happy unfolds in a series of overlapping, parallel scenes that take place in the separate - yet deeply interconnected - homes of Emma (Kate Miles) and Paul (Paul Kemp), a divorced couple now living with their new partners Graham (Steven Elder) and Katy (Carolyn Backhouse).

Each couple has its problems. Paul, a struggling writer, has been diagnosed with lung cancer, while Graham and Emma’s relationship is undergoing strain, not helped by the presence of a very vocal new baby. Meanwhile, Graham, an advertising executive who’s currently (and hilariously) “brainstorming notions of happiness” in order to best promote a new chocolate bar, wants Paul to collaborate on the campaign. Flitting between the two houses, and delivering sometimes indiscreet dispatches from each, is Paul and Emma’s teenage daughter Daisy (Kate Lamb), who’s harbouring hopes of bringing her parents back together.

At first, Lewis’s conceit of having the two families simultaneously occupy the same space in overlapping scenes feels clunky and obtrusive. But the structure moves into elegance as the evening progresses, creating some effective juxtapositions between the events in the two households: rhyming incidents of domestic discord and complicity. The relationships are, for the most part, sharply drawn, and just when you think Lewis is about to take a swerve into sentimentality you’re surprised by some unanticipated twist or acerbic observation.

The thematic focus of How To Be Happy is - you guessed! - the concept of happiness, and, in particular, its relationship to consumerism. Paul (in one of the play’s improbabilities, or, at least, its heavy-handed ironies) once wrote a self-help book on the subject of happiness and has worked in the advertising industry himself. But he has now come to disdain Graham’s profession, which he views as responsible for the sorry state of a society in which people feel pressured “to spend money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.”

What’s most admirable about Lewis’s writing, though, is that it refuses to employ the characters simply as one-dimensional representations of a particular idea. Rather, the people here are believably inconsistent muddles of contradictions, each with his or her measure of awareness and neurosis.

Graham may represent the horrors of consumer capitalism to Paul, but Steven Elder’s expert performance presents Graham as a rather ineffectual man, affable and eager to please, and nursing his own sense of futility and disillusionment. (It’s not until the end that we see a trace of steeliness.) Similarly, Paul’s rants against consumerism are, as his ex-wife points out, somewhat undermined by his own attachment to his iPhone.

The raspy-voiced Paul Kemp doesn’t fall into the trap of trying to make the disappointed, rather whiny Paul too sympathetic or easily appealing, and the other roles are played with equal bite. As Emma, Kate Miles brilliantly conveys the insecurity and frustration of a woman who’s walked away from one unsatisfactory marriage only to find herself in another. And although the characterisation of Daisy takes an unfortunate late slide into psychobabble, Kate Lamb (a young actress to watch) is spot-on as the daddy’s girl.

Some moments fail to completely convince - the growing intimacy between Graham and Katy, in particular - and the play’s contemporary allusions - Lady Gaga, The X Factor - occasionally feel pat. But Lewis’s spry production nicely conveys the shifts in tone of his writing, as the mood moves from broad comedy to contemplation, with the action underscored by classical pieces that range from jaunty, brisk baroque to the intense drama of Schubert’s Winterreise (“a good break-up CD,” in Paul’s definition). And the production’s truly delicious closing moments, which leave one character alone on stage and make the best use of The Ronettes’s “Be My Baby” since the opening of Scorsese’s Mean Streets, are perfectly judged. Lewis’s play has its glib and undeveloped elements, but at its best it reflects wittily and poignantly on the way we live now.

The production runs for 2 hours 20 minutes and is booking until November 5. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

 
 
Reviewed for British Theatre Guide.