Theatre Review: Directors Showcase - The Burglar Who Failed, Return to Sender, & Dutchman (Orange Tree)

The Orange Tree’s annual Directors Showcase double-bill turns out, this year (and to the evident confusion of some audience members), to be a triple-bill, and a rather diverse and challenging one, at that. Selected and directed by the theatre’s two resident trainees, Karima Setohy and Polina Kalinina, the three short plays whisk the viewer from a bedroom in Edwardian Wimbledon to a 1960s New York City subway car via an unexpected - and thoroughly unnerving - excursion into Funny Games territory.  It’s a varied programme, then, but one that proves surprisingly complementary. The plays are linked by a concern with identity, class, prejudice, power and communication, issues which are explored through a series of charged encounters that threaten to – and indeed sometimes do – erupt into violence.

The evening opens comfortably enough with its lightest piece, The Burglar Who Failed by St. John Hankin, the Edwardian playwright whose The Charity That Began At Home received a proficient production by Auriol Smith at the Orange Tree at the end of last year. The Burglar... starts out like a proto-Home Alone escapade, with a pint-sized vigilante – Jessica Clark’s eager, sporty Dolly Maxwell – fending off David Antrobus’s intruder Bill Bludgeon with a hockey stick when she finds him hiding under her bed. But rather than erupting into full-blown farce and slapstick, the play takes a surprising turn, as Bludgeon confesses his distaste for his profession and the practical-minded Dolly sets about offering him career advice.

As in The Charity That Began At Home, then, Hankin both celebrates and lightly satirises middle-class Edwardian philanthropic inclinations here, and Setohy’s low-key production – though perhaps a little more static than is necessary in the second half – has genuine charm.    It doesn’t add up to much, overall, but proves diverting  throughout, with lovely, affectionate performances from Clark and Antrobus, and from Paula Stockbridge as Dolly’s harried, anxious mother.       

Hankin’s wry brand of Edwardian empathy gets swapped for very contemporary unease in the second piece, Omar El-Khairy’s Return to Sender, a “response” to Hankin’s play that immerses the viewer in a considerably less cosy “home invasion” situation. Accomplished via a slow and superbly unsettling set-change segue, the production (also directed by Setohy) is effectively cross-cast with The Burglar Who Failed, and finds Clark brilliantly trading wholesomeness for menace as Rebecca, a teenager who’s holding hostage a well-to-do couple, Tom and Heather, for reasons that remain ambiguous to the end.

El-Khairy riffs cleverly on The Burglar... to produce a drama that touches upon a range of contemporary hot potatoes - the demonisation of youth, familial dysfunction, teenage sexuality and social inequality - while leaving plenty of space for audience interpretation. As Rebecca taunts Tom and Heather with threats of violence, accusations of infidelity and insinuations about their absent daughter Emma, the end result, as previously suggested, is more Haneke than Hankin, especially when Rebecca responds to Tom’s despairing “Why don’t you just kill us?” with the ineffably Funny Games-ish retort: “And deprive everyone of entertainment?” In addition, there’s more than a suggestion of Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake in the play’s use of a disruptive outsider figure to pick away at a middle-class family’s facade of respectability.

The writing isn’t always inspired (“You’re boring me!” shrieks Tom, unaccountably, to Rebecca at one point) and the pay-off lacks punch. But Setohy’s production retains a taut intensity, and is punctuated by nicely-judged moments of gallows humour. There are memorable jarring details, too - Rebecca’s knowledgability about classical music, for one - in a play that expresses a great deal of scepticism about how well we can know others, whether strangers or those allegedly “closest” to us.

 

A final disquieting encounter plays out in Kalinina’s expert production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman which, opening to the strains of “Sinnerman,” presents a provocative parable of American race relations. Written in the early '60s, at the height of its author’s embracing of Black Nationalism, and hailed by Norman Mailer as “the best play in America,” Baraka’s drama focuses on the meeting of a white woman, Lula (Sally Oliver), and a middle-class black man, Clay (Paapa Essiedu), on a subway car (nicely rendered in Sam Dowson’s clever design). It’s an encounter that moves from playful flirtation and sexual interest to a highly-charged exchange of racist invective (some of which elicited gasps of shock from certain audience members). “We’ll pretend that you’re free of your history... and I’m free of mine” suggests Lula. But the impossibility of such a pretence is Dutchman’s thesis, as the two protagonists find themselves unable to extricate themselves from the script of American race and gender roles.

Given that the play is, in Baraka’s terms, about “the difficulty of becoming a man in America [where] manhood – black or white – is not wanted” it’s not surprising that the characterisation of Lula is decidedly problematic. A flagrant sexual tease, neurotic liar and racist, the character doesn’t just represent “the spirit of America” she’s also Eve, and arrives bearing a whole bag full of apples as she attempts to tempt Clay out of his assimilationist stance. Oliver overcomes the crassness of the characterisation with a full-on physical performance that’s brave and striking, and she’s well-matched by Essiedu who brings wry humour and watchfulness to Clay as well as a captivating ferocity to the character’s explosive tirade at the end.

Brash and Beat-influenced, punchy and pushy (small wonder that this is a play that found favour with Norman Mailer!), Baraka’s highly mannered dialogue is American to the core – but there’s no disputing its charge and vigour in performance. The pessimism of the playwright’s vision in Dutchman – in which relationships between blacks and whites are presented as a cycle of acrimony and violence that’s destined to repeat itself, ad infinitum – is hard to take. But, buoyed by its vivid performances and boosted by the intimacy of the Orange Tree’s space, Kalinina’s production flies.

The Directors Showcase runs for 2 hrs, 15 minutes, with interval. It’s at the Orange Tree until 30th June. Further information at the Orange Tree website. Photos by Robert Day.

Theatre Review: Directors' Showcase (Orange Tree Theatre)

The Spring season at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre concludes, as usual, with the Directors’ Showcase programme: a double-bill of short plays directed by the theatre’s two trainee directors. This year, the Showcase presents the work of Jimmy Grimes and Teunkie van der Sluijs, and avails itself of the talents of several of the actors from the theatre’s just-concluded run of Three Farces. Grimes presents Then the Snow Came, a new piece that he has researched with Richmond’s homeless charity SPEAR and that combines verbatim text with improvisation and (briefly) puppetry, while van der Sluijs directs Winter, a play by Jon Fosse, the prize-winning Norwegian writer whose I Am the Wind deeply divided audiences at the Young Vic earlier this year. These two apparently contrasting pieces prove surprisingly complementary and make for a challenging but rewarding evening at the Orange Tree.

Taking as its inspiration an impromptu night that the director himself spent on the streets of Richmond, Grimes’s Then the Snow Came focuses on the relationship between two homeless men, the bolshie ex-con Mickey (Kieron Jecchinis) and the more soulful and philosophically-inclined Liverpudlian Stu (Daniel Cheyne). The play follows the two men as they move around various Richmond locations, looking for a place to sleep, begging, bantering about Star Trek, and talking about their lives. Matters come to a head when Mickey is faced with the challenge of scraping together some money for a trip up North for a family emergency. Threaded throughout the narrative is Oscar Wilde’s tale The Happy Prince, the story of which Stu tells to Mickey and which serves throughout as a comment on some of the themes of the piece and a counterpoint to the men’s developing relationship.

It’s an ambitious mixture of elements, but one that Grimes manages to pull off with care and skill, resulting in a compassionate but unsentimental drama that’s shot through with both pain and humour, as well as some nicely judged poetic and expressionistic flourishes. Jecchinis and Cheyne give superbly naturalistic performances, their efforts complemented by the appearances of a multi-tasking Ed Bennett who cameos in no less than seven different roles, the most significant being that of a police officer whose retrospective narration structures the piece.

Although some of the scenes are a little short, the play maintains fluidity and momentum throughout, helped along by an effective and economical design by Katy Mills. There’s also an especially affecting late scene between Mickey and his estranged teenage son Ben, who’s very well played by Michael Smith. Although it goes far beyond reportage, there’s no doubting that the various local references, and the fact that the audience is watching the play in a venue in the very town in which it is set, contribute to the resonance of Then the Snow Came, giving the piece an urgent and at times implicatory power. It’s a considerable piece of work and a terrific achievement for Grimes and his collaborators.

If the following piece, Winter, emerges as rather less satisfying then that’s due to Fosse’s play, rather than any major faults in the production. Like I Am the Wind, this is another elliptical two-hander, this time focusing upon an encounter between a married businessman and a disturbed young woman in an unnamed city. At times, the piece suggests a Pinterized variant on the plot of a screwball comedy, the kind in which a “crazy lady” shakes up the life of a staid, conservative man.

But not only does Fosse’s text offer next to no humour it also offers little in the way of real insight. What is offered is more of the gratingly repetitious, “rhythmic” dialogue that is evidently the playwright’s trademark, and which is no doubt faithfully rendered in Ann Henning Jocelyn’s translation. Playing ‘The Woman,’ poor Jennifer Higham has to declaim the phrase “I am your lady” so many times that she starts to sound like the opening lines of the chorus to Jennifer Rush’s “The Power of Love,” stuck on repeat. Thus the play’s portrait of two people struggling towards connection never becomes quite as affecting as it should.

Despite the play’s limitations, both actors come through with committed performances. Higham, often cast for fresh-faced wholesomeness, shakes off that particular shackle with a striking interpretation that encompasses strung-out neediness, foul-mouthed ferocity and girlish vulnerability. Always a sympathetic stage presence, Stuart Fox is touchingly tentative here as ‘The Man,’ although one can’t help but wish that he was playing less of an archetype and more of a freshly imagined character. The quality of the acting, and the sensitivity of van der Sluijs’s direction, ensure that the production sustains interest, in spite of the qualms one may have about the script itself, while Sam Dowson’s design and Stuart Burgess’s lighting help to convey a palpable sense of atmosphere as the action shifts from park to hotel room and back again. Overall, then, this is an impressive double-bill that makes for a strong conclusion to an altogether excellent season at the Orange Tree.

The Directors Showcase runs until 9th July. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.