Theatre Review: Unrivalled Landscape (Orange Tree)

“If it is a choice between Richmond and death, I chose death,” sulked Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf (c/o David Hare) in one of The Hours’s worst camp moments. Titled in reference to the Walter Scott quotation that deemed Richmond “an unrivalled landscape” and drawn from material produced by the theatre’s Writers Group, the six short plays that constitute this year’s Orange Tree Directors Showcase seek to construct a more complex portrait of the leafy Greater London ‘burb (hometown to yours truly) than Hare and co provided. Just as Jimmy Grimes’s And Then The Snow Came explored the plight of Richmond’s homeless in the 2011 Directors Showcase, OT writers have again been encouraged to take the theatre’s hometown itself as Muse, creating work that unfolds in Richmond and its environs, with the development of the pieces overseen by this year’s pair of resident trainee directors, Alexander Lass and Nadia Papachronopoulou.

It’s an interesting premise, to be sure, but one that doesn’t consistently pay the dividends it could. The bar having been set high by last year’s wonderfully confounding Showcase (which progressed, brilliantly, from a quaint Edwardian proto-Home Alone escapade to a fierce take on Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman via a spot of disturbing Haneke-esque home invasion) Unrivalled Landscape ends up feeling more uneven by comparison, despite the intimately collaborative nature of its genesis. Still, the evening offers some striking moments and strong performances, and rewards the patient viewer with a radiant finale.

While the pieces are tonally and formally diverse (encompassing the comic and the melancholy, monologues and duologues, the naturalistic and the surreal) Lass, Papachronopoulou and the writers have striven to make them interconnected affairs; the dramas are based around the trajectories of five individuals, characters who might be mere bit-players in one play and then become protagonists in the next. The evening opens by sounding its most eerily enigmatic note in Laura Muth’s intriguing but too-brief “Killing Time”, which finds a suicidal man, Andy (John Bowler), conversing with a “tourist” (Sarah Malin) during a night-time deer cull in “the purgatory of Richmond Park.” It’s an apt curtain-raiser for a sequence of plays that mostly focus upon characters who feel hunted or haunted to some degree.

However, the connections between the pieces seem less intricately worked out that they might have been, with a couple of characters feeling crowbarred into their scenarios, and, more disappointingly, the significance of the Richmond locales isn’t always maximised. Andy’s story, for example, is later elaborated in Ernest Hall’s “Goodbye From Me” a monologue-as-meltdown that finds the character delivering a torturously inept stand-up comedy routine the day before his prison release, resulting in a confession of tragedy that’s supplemented by a ghostly apparition. But where “Killing Time” is too brief, “Goodbye From Me” (which doesn’t even take place in Richmond in any case) feels over-lengthy and despite a thoroughly committed performance from Bowler is neither funny nor touching enough to sustain itself or the portrait of the crying-on-the-outside comedian that it presents.

Archie Maddocks’s more accomplished “Kizzy and the Prince” builds on the promise of the playwright’s excellent riots-inspired Mottled Lines with a piece that presents a Kew Gardens-set encounter between a spiky Trinadadian security guard, Kizzy (Nicola Alexis), and – yup – a Bahraini prince, Faris (Ash Hunter). If the scenario sounds more than a mite contrived, Maddocks’s punchy, poetic writing transcends it, as do Alexis and Hunter’s fine performances which spark Papachronopoulou’s carefully modulated production. It’s a pity, therefore, that Kizzy and Faris’s narrative is picked up less compellingly in Benedict Fogarty’s “Ties” – which focuses on a hospital row between the pair that boasts over-explicit dialogue (“My family is part of a tyrannous regime!” announces Faris) and one of the stage’s least convincing pregnant bellies, as it demonstrates the myriad complications involved in hooking up with a Prince.

The central thematic of “ties” – to one’s past, to other human beings, to previous identities – receives a more vibrant spin in Will Gore’s “Portman Avenue” which takes its inspiration from an extraordinary real event: the fall of an African stowaway from an aeroplane flying over East Sheen. Said incident is here witnessed by Kizzy who, being courted at this stage by Faris, receives a visit from a pissed-off reporter, Kate (Malin), who’s keen to quiz her on what she’s seen. The most ambitiously structured of the pieces in its (often effective) recourse to overlapping scenes, Gore’s play ultimately struggles to bring all the characters together convincingly, but it has great touches and boasts an absolutely terrific turn from Alexis, here trading the swaggering confidence of her first appearance for fear and vulnerability as Kizzy’s painful memories resurface.

Last up is Caitlin Shannon’s super “The Getaway” which brings the evening full circle by transforming the “purgatory” of Richmond Park into a Paradise of sorts. The jewel of the evening, Shannon’s play is simply lovely: a warm, funny, fluid piece that charts the interaction of Kate with Gary (Kieron Jecchinis), the ex-cop Park warden who’s supervising her volunteering work. Oscillating between bolshiness and tenderness, the pair – he a Western-movie enthusiast and stickler for Park rules given to California dreaming, she a divorcee seeking solace in Nature and scornful of Hollywood myths – finally share a moment of drunken connection under the stars, an encounter that incidentally features the best bit of stage iPhone abuse since Anna Calder Marshall memorably boiled a mobile in Salt, Root and Roe.

“The Getaway” can’t bring the disparate, sometimes straggly strands of the other plays together. But this text, deeply concerned with redemption, redeems the evening, offering its most insightful discourse on identity and the possibility of change. Indeed, Shannon’s play, wittily scored and beautifully performed by Malin and Jecchinis, does what you hoped all these plays would do. It wrests something at once local and universal, profound and mundane, from its Richmond setting, leaving the viewer with a renewed sense of the potential for interest, beauty and connection in a town that - as is certainly the case for this writer - they may feel they know all too well.

Running until July 13.

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.

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.