Theatre Review: Humble Boy (Orange Tree)

Jonathan Broadbent in Humble Boy (Credit: Manuel Harlan)

In The Full Room, his combative and deliciously partisan “A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting,” Dominic Dromgoole speculates that the work of Charlotte Jones “may represent the future of a form of populist theatre.” Praising her plays for their “magic realism that reflects life,” their “pervasive warping of the world, practised with heartfelt affection,” Dromgoole states that “Jones is naturally a public writer, and the theatre desperately needs talent like hers. Writers who can talk to an audience, engage them without begging for favour, and gently change their perceptions.”

Dromgoole’s loving appraisal was written with reference to two Jones plays – In Flame and Martha, Josie and the Teenage Elvis, which won her the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2000 – and just before the premiere of the work that would prove her biggest hit (so far): Humble Boy. Staged at the National Theatre in 2001, before a West End transfer the following year, Humble Boy offers a distinctive, appealing mix of sitcom humour, poetic flourish, family conflict, science and bee-lore, as it focuses on the return of a depressed Oxford research fellow, Felix Humble, to his family home in the Cotswolds following the death of his father, where he finds his mother already contemplating marriage to another man. The play’s ghostly intertext is, of course, Hamlet, and John Caird’s original production came complete with several cast members from the NT’s contemporaneous staging of Shakespeare’s play, most notably Simon Russell Beale, whom Jones had in mind when writing the lead role.

Inevitably, Paul Miller’s new production of the play, its first UK revival, doesn’t have the associations of Caird’s original staging. But it makes a great, fresh case for the play anyway - and a welcome one, since, contrary to Dromgoole’s prediction, Jones’s post-Humble work, such as 2004’s chilly The Dark, proved less immediately accessible to audiences. Here Simon Daw’s lovely garden set – with ivy up the pillars, and flowers planted into the stage - provides the cosy entry point for a play that cleverly mobilises the mode of pastoral English comedy for its own cheeky and sometimes subversive ends.    

Belinda Lang in Humble Boy (Credit: Manuel Harlan)

Jones is a whiz at writing characters with distinctive, individual voices and those voices come through vividly here in a memorable set of performances. The mother/son conflict is brought out particularly sharply from the off, with Jonathan Broadbent’s terrific Felix stuttering in his cricket whites as he observes his Ma’s removal of the bees that were his deceased entomologist father’s passion, pride and joy. By turns smart-alecky and achingly vulnerable, Broadbent makes the role his own, bringing both humour and real poignancy to Felix’s intellectual questioning and his confrontation with the limits of his own theorising. He’s exceedingly well-matched by Belinda Lang as the brittle matriarch Flora; elegant in sunglasses and Jean Muir, Lang shows no concern for likeability as she relishes the character’s waspish ripostes yet also suggests the crushed hopes that motivate Flora’s cruelty and vanity.  

As Rosie, the girlfriend whom Felix unceremoniously ditched when he left for Oxford, Rebekah Hinds makes the character a wry, resilient anti-Ophelia, while Selina Cadell’s befuddled, self-effacing hanger-on Mercy coverts a lunchtime grace – where conversation has already shifted from accusation to revelation to the best way to kill yourself – into a tragicomic showstopper.  

Selina Cadell and Christopher Ravenscroft in Humble Boy
(Credit: Manuel Harlan) 

Randy and ruddy-faced, a prosthetic penis poking out of his pants during the infamous urination scene, Paul Bradley brings a bullish, vulgarian’s vitality to the proceedings as Flora’s would-be fiancé. The spirit to Bradley’s flesh, Christopher Ravenscroft is as glorious here as he’s been in all his Orange Tree roles (Alison’s House, The Promise, The Conspirators, The Man Who Pays the Piper, The Stepmother), his gorgeous voice – a honeyed tone, indeed – employed to perfect effect as Jim, the gardener with a secret.  

Beautifully lit by Mark Doubleday to conjure summer's days and evenings, Miller’s production is perfectly attuned to the tonal shits in Jones’s writing. As farcical set-ups give way to philosophical speculation, the production builds to a transcendent, redemptive final sequence that re-purposes Ophelia’s mad scene to create one of the most beautiful and moving finales in contemporary British drama. Absent from UK stages for far too long, it’s good news that Jones has a new play, The Meeting, coming up at Chichester Festival Theatre from July, a complement to this richly enjoyable revival.     

Booking until 14 April. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: The Man Who Pays The Piper (Orange Tree)

Deirdre Mullins in The Man Who Pays The Piper (Orange Tree)

Beau in tow, irreverent 18-year-old Daryll Fairley (Deirdre Mullins) tangos home in the early hours after a night on the town, much to the chagrin of her pa Arthur (Christopher Ravenscroft), who’s waiting up to let her in. Daryll, you see, isn’t allowed a latch-key of her own, unlike her older brother. Pointing out the unfairness of this situation, Daryll expresses her desire to be “independent,” an idea which her father disdains. “It’s time you married – a man who can master you,” Arthur proclaims, reminding Daryll that, while she’s under his roof (and receiving an allowance from him), it’s he who gets to make the rules.

The contradictions inherent in this excellent opening scene resonate throughout GB Stern’s 1931 play The Man Who Pays The Piper which explores shifts in gender roles (and their economic underpinnings) in the post-World War I period, its wider social picture emerging through an intimate focus on the Fairley family’s fortunes over almost 20 years. It’s no coincidence that the play chimes beautifully with the previous Orange Tree production The Stepmother (with which it’s partially – and very effectively – cross-cast), as another examination of the way that “money matters” in familial relationships, penned by another insightful (and neglected) woman writer grappling with the changes of her time. As in Githa Sowerby’s play, the focus in The Man Who Pays The Piper is on a female breadwinner, for after her father’s death it’s Daryll who ends up being the head of the Fairley household, taking over the running of a West End dress-making firm and supporting the (ever-growing) family financially. It’s a role that Daryll views with increasing ambivalence, though, as she finds herself in the unfortunate position of echoing her father’s pronouncements about what should and shouldn’t be done in the house.

Less straightforward – and ultimately richer – than The Stepmother, Stern’s play is a fascinatingly conflicted work that never seems to resolve its feelings about its complex and compelling heroine. At the heart of the piece is an exploration of domestic power, and the suggestion that being the economic head of a household has the potential to make a man or a woman become a tyrant - or, perhaps, just someone laying down justifiable boundaries and rules. On the one hand the piece presents Daryll as a completely competent woman: shrewd and intelligent in business, mostly generous to the family’s demands. On the other, it comes close to suggesting that there’s something particularly corrupting or “unnatural” about a female assuming this role, as Daryll struggles with her work/life balance, becomes tetchy and demanding at times, and deems marriage to her ever-patient boyf Rufus (Simon Harrison) to be an impossibility.

Helen Leblique’s fluid and confident production embraces the play’s contradictions. The evening is lengthy (2 hours 45 minutes including interval) but momentum doesn’t flag, primarily because Stern’s writing is so full of surprises and unexpected developments. The play keeps you on your toes, changing mood and tone very swiftly from comedy to crisis. Ironies and incongruities abound. There’s a very surprising remarriage, a blazing row that swerves into a proposal, a wonderful moment of supreme drunken revelry. And Leblique makes even the set changes witty.

A large cast skilfully fleshes out vivid characters. Stuart Fox is hilarious as an unexpected new family member. Emily Tucker is piquant as the good-time-girl flagrantly disobeying her sister’s rules yet dismayed at the prospect of leaving behind her home comforts. As another sister, Jennifer Higham makes herself the epitome of eager-to-please timidity, while Julia Watson, as Mother, is the quintessence of daffiness. And the brilliant Deirdre Mullins captures precisely Daryll’s conflicts as she finds herself both despising and delighting in her position as the family “autocrat.”

The conflicts within the play itself are never more apparent than in a spectacularly confounding final scene which comes up with a wonderfully unusual – yet perfectly workable – solution to a particular dilemma, then backtracks and rejects it, before seeming to backtrack again, ending the piece on a memorable moment of ambiguity. Beautifully brought out in Leblique’s production, the combination of the radical and the reactionary in Stern’s writing makes The Man Who Pays The Piper an absorbing rediscovery, and one guaranteed to provoke a lot of post-show debate.

The production is booking until 13th April. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

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: 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.