Theatre Review: Last Easter (Orange Tree)

 

Part of the great delight of Lindsey Turner's current take on Under Milk Wood at the National Theatre is the production's staging in-the-round, which helps to make its care home setting an environment that the audience can feel fully immersed in. With Turner's radiant production fresh in the mind, returning to one of our smallest but most vital in-the-round spaces - the mighty Orange Tree - for Tinuke Craig's revival of Bryony Lavery's 2004 play Last Easter felt like a particularly exciting prospect. Unfortunately, though, where Under Milk Wood was an exceptionally warm, sensitive and embracing experience, Last Easter proves forced, obvious and off-putting from the start. 

Told via the tiresome, self-conscious mix of narration, audience address and dialogue that seems to have become a default mode for contemporary dramatists who can't always be bothered to dramatise, Lavery's play focuses on four friends - lighting designer June, performers Gash and Joy, and prop-maker Leah - as they navigate the news of June's diagnosis with secondary cancer. The first half trivialises Lourdes, as the foursome take a trip there in the tentative hope of getting the atheist June healed. And the second half trivialises euthanasia, as June, her condition deteriorating, asks her friends to carry out an assisted suicide. Throughout, bad jokes and banter are meant to serve as a shield covering the protagonists' pain at the prospective loss of their friend. 

I say "meant to" because that's what the play, extremely frugal with honest emotion, never makes us feel, in fact. And Craig's production - staged with a spase, casual set by Hannah Wolfe that mostly consists of four chairs and a keyboard, but at least boasting a brilliant, expressive lighting design by the great Elliot Griggs (Pomona, An Octoroon) - only exacerbates the writing's trivializing tendencies. Compared to an intelligent film like Jessica Hausner's Lourdes (2009)  Last Easter could be a cartoon. Barring a few attempts at poetic flourishes, a fatally larky tone dominates, and leads, in a couple of cases, to an over-emphatic performance style that's too much for the small space. 

Since the characters lack context and depth, it's probably not the actors' fault that the four never even convince as a group of friends: in particular, Peter Caulfield 's quipping, cruising, Garland-loving Gash (he's GAY, ok), and Ellie Piercy's Joy, a highly-strung party girl haunted by a boyfriend who committed suicide, don't develop much beyond stereotype. Both play and production feel at once antic and hollow, with the status of the four protagonists as "theatre people" leading to several half-baked meta moments, some of which result in ironies that can't always have been intended. "This is undramatic," notes Gash at a few points. Well, yes, when a playwright insists on telling the audience instead of showing or evoking things to them, it is. "The best thing about religion is the lighting," Naana Agyei-Ampadu's June remarks early on. It's by far the best thing about this production, too.  

 Last Easter is booking at the Orange Tree until 7 August. 

Theatre Review: Candida (Orange Tree)

Martin Hutson as Morell and Claire Lams as Candida.
(Photograph: Johan Persson)

Among the continuities that Paul Miller's tenure at the Orange Tree has preserved with Sam Walters' Artistic Directorship is the frequent presentation of George Bernard Shaw's plays. Focusing so far on the early work, Miller's smart, assured takes on Widowers' Houses and The Philanderer (I missed 2017's Misalliance) have shown how Shavian drama, which  sometimes seems sluggish in bigger auditoria, can spark to life in the Orange Tree's intimate space.

This proves the case again with Candida, Miller's fourth Shaw at the OT. Written in 1894, it's a play in which conflicting ideas and attitudes underpin a love triangle, as the playwright paints a satirical portrait of cusp-of-the-century London that contrasts faith versus social justice; honesty versus self-deception; the poet and the preacher.

The heroine is the wife of Reverend James Morell, a Christian Socialist clergyman who has dissociated himself from his father-in-law, Burgess, an East End factory owner, due to his exploitation of women workers. Morell’s love rival is 18-year-old Eugene Marchbanks, a poet of aristo background who is 15 years younger than Candida. 

Martin Hutson as Morell and Joseph Potter as Marchbanks 
(Photograph: Johan Persson)

Candida's choice between the poet’s flamboyance and vigor and the clergyman’s dedication and reliability drives the plot. There are indulgent moments but Miller and the cast keep the proceedings fleet and funny throughout. Velvet-voiced Claire Lams comes into her own as Candida, conveying precisely what Shaw specifies as the "largeness of mind and dignity of character to ennoble her cunning in the affections". Martin Hutson brings charisma and energy to Morrell and, completing the triangle, Joseph Potter throws himself into the role of Marchbanks with gusto in a distinguished professional debut.   

In support, Kwaku Mills camps amusingly as the junior cleric Alexander Mill and Sarah Middleton - operating in a very different mode to her last OT appearance in Pomona - generates some of the evenings biggest laughs as Morrell's secretary Proserpine Garnett, alongside Michael Simkins as the problematic pater. 

Placing newspaper headlines and Socialist pamphlets of the period around the set, Simon Daw’s design doesn't allow us to forget the historical context. The conclusion won't please everyone but Miller's enjoyable production offers plenty of delights. 

Booking until 31 January. Further information here.

Theatre Review: Directors' Festival 2019 (Orange Tree)

The Mikvah Project (Photo: Robert Day)

This is the third year that the Orange Tree has run its Directors' Festival, which presents the work of graduates from St. Mary's University's MA Theatre Directing course over a week of performances. As Paul Miller has previously noted, "director training is part of the OT's DNA," and the initiative has its roots in the long-running Directors' Showcase seasons of Sam Walters' tenure, when the theatre's trainees staged such seldom-seen plays as Caryl Churchill's The After-Dinner Joke and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, which featured future Hamlet Paapa Essiedu in a galvanising turn. 

This year, the four plays presented are, once again, all contemporary works, ones that, via a series of excellent designs by the enterprising team of Cory Shipp, Chris McDonnell (lighting) and Lex Kosanke (sound), transport the audience from the Portuguese capital to the mindscapes of a love-seeking man and woman, from mountain tops to a Mikvah bath. 

The latter is the location for Josh Azouz's The Mikvah Project, which, with a surprising amount of humour, unfolds a love story between two very different Jewish men who meet every Friday to take part in the religious ritual of water submersion. Avi is a married thirtysomething trying for a child with his wife, while Eitan is an Arsenal-loving 17-year-old. As the men talk and bond, mutual attraction surfaces, which Eitan is keen to act on. 

As a portrait of gay desire struggling with culture, The Mikvah Project suggests a Jewish Brokeback Mountain or, more aptly, a companion to the excellent 2009 Israeli film Eyes Wide Open. Shipp's set opens a pool in the OT floor which the actors slip into and out of. At such moments, Georgia Green's audience-inclusive production creates a palpable erotic tension, while also indulging some broad comedy, especially in a manic and very funny Alicante-set interlude. Grace notes are found in the well-judged performances, with Dylan Mason capturing Eitan's ardency and Robert Neumark Jones touchingly conveying Avi's conflicts. 

Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography (Photo: Robert Day) 

A more caustic take on modern relationships is offered in Declan Greene's Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography, which presents a hook-up between a nurse and an IT worker - each with their own problems. (He's a miserably married porn addict, and she a debt-ridden shopaholic.) It's more "meet desperate" than "meet cute," and the fantastic opening scene captures the relentlessness and absurdity of needy online interactions with wince-inducing perceptiveness. 

The bluntness of the title carries over into much of the dialogue, which Cate Hamer and Matthew Douglas deliver with aplomb, getting a great rhythm going. Nothing revelatory is said about the way in which technology feeds on and frustrates the human need for intimacy. But, with crackling bursts of static and illumination, Gianluca Lello's sharp and intelligent production makes wonderfully dynamic a play which, like The Mikvah Project, tends to (over-)rely on to-audience narration rather than the creation of dramatic scenes. 

Pilgrims (Photo: Robert Day)

The other two plays in the festival are engaging three-handers. Elinor Cook's Pilgrims offers a feminist take on (male) wanderlust and folk song, with Nicholas Armfield and Luke MacGregor as two dedicated climbers and Adeyinka Akinrinade as the PhD student who, in conventional parlance, "comes between them." Armfield and MacGregor convey an affectionate, but also tense and competitive, bond and Akinrinade moves compellingly from sparkiness to disappointment as the girl who gives up her own dream for theirs. 

Mythological and archetypal resonances are incorporated with a slightly heavy hand, but Ellie Goodall's production is fluid and sensitive, negotiating temporal and location shifts with elegant economy (plus some lovely a capella folk singing by the cast), and giving the production a mystical undertone. Signposted from the outset, the outcome seems predictable, but the play twists in an unexpected direction in the subversive and exceptionally well-played final scene. 

Sadness and Joy in the Life of Giraffes (Photo: Robert Day)  

The most obviously dazzling and surprising of the four productions is Wiebke Green's take on Tiago Rodrigues' Sadness and Joy in the Life of Giraffes. The premise of this play - the imaginative odyssey of a 9-year-old across Lisbon, accompanied by her teddy bear (named Judy Garland) - sounds like the height of preciousness. But, belying its overt playful qualities, Rodrigues' writing (presented here in a fine poetic/profane translation by Mark O'Thomas) turns out to have plenty of bite, and succeeds in confounding the viewer at every turn. "Judy Garland" (a hilarious, bear-suited Nathan Welsh), for one, has suicidal tendencies, a Ted-ish vocabulary and attitude to spare, while the play itself has decidedly complex things to say about loss and the relationship of language to experience. 

Green keeps the proceedings fleet, funny and physical throughout, with the great Gyuri Sarossy multi-tasking superbly as "The Man Who Is My Father" and all the other blokes encountered on the journey. (Including Chekhov!) But ultimately the evening belongs to Eve Ponsonby who gives a sublime and exhilarating performance as the smarty pants, dictionary-devouring heroine who has more to learn about life and language than she realises. A brilliant and barmy trip, Green's hugely enjoyable production makes the viewer wish for more Portuguese plays - and certainly more plays by Rodrigues - on the UK stage. 

The Directors' Festival runs until 11 August. Further information and booking details here. 

Theatre Review: The Brink (Orange Tree)

“How can I teach on top of a bomb?!” wails Nick, the harried hero of Brad Birch’s new play The Brink. A secondary school history teacher, Nick has been experiencing weird dreams which seem to portend some imminent catastrophe. Stress and depression are variously diagnosed and dismissed as the causes by his girlfriend Chloe and his colleague Jo. But Nick’s visions appear to have an all-too-real root when the school’s slightly loopy Head, Mr. Boyd, lets slip that there’s an unexploded bomb under the playing field, a revelation which sends Nick into a tailspin of anxiety, shared only, it seems, by the sympathetic student, Jessica, in whom he (sort of) confides.

There’s considerable buzz already around The Brink, which is receiving its premiere at the Orange Tree, in a production by Mel Hillyard, who’s directing the piece as recipient of the J.P. Morgan Award for Emerging Director. With a crisp design by Hyemi Shin (in which glowing blocks are the only props) and Bowie’s  “"Heroes"” on the soundtrack, the production looks set to capitalise on the hipster-friendly hype of Alistair McDowall’s Pomona. There are definitely some parallels between the two pieces: this, too, is very much a young man’s play, with an attendant paranoia about power, some (overly-)broad comic strokes, and a slightly studied opacity.

A little like Florian Zeller's The Father (which is being performed just a few steps away from the OT at Richmond Theatre this week), The Brink doesn’t just explore a mental state; rather, it attempts, through its form, to embody one. As Nick (Ciarán Owens) unravels, role doublings, well-executed by the competent cast (Vince Leigh, Shvorne Marks, Alice Haig), prove more significant than you might initially have thought, the line between projection, dream and reality gradually blurring. 

Alas, also like Pomona, The Brink doesn't add up to the sum of its parts for this viewer, ultimately frustrating more than it rewards. Birch’s writing has flashes of acuity when it comes to showing the dynamics between teachers and hinting at the weirdness beneath the daily routine. But certain moments - such as a truly awful scatological speech allotted to Jo - seem entirely pointless, and some bad gags (“Pick, pick, pick! They should have called you Picholas, not Nicholas!”) fall totally flat.

Starting in quippy one-liner-heavy mode, before attempting a more menacing turn, the tone is wobbly and uncertain, and the play feels sadly superficial where it really counts. By far the most interesting relationship is between Nick and Jessica, the lone student in his "Maths Club" who wants desperately, touchingly to believe that her teacher’s right. Yet Birch backs off from really exploring this relationship, which might have provided a relatable human centre to the drama.

Hillyard certainly succeeds in keeping the production brisk and fluid, with some nifty scene-changes that evoke the overlaps and parallels forming in the protagonist’s consciousness. And Owens contributes a skilfully modulated performance of increasing desperation. Yet, by the showy, twisty yet strangely limp conclusion, The Brink has promised more than it’s delivered.

The Brink is booking at the Orange Tree until 30 April. Further details here. 

Theatre Review: buckets (Orange Tree)

A silver slide. Vases of yellow flowers. Some red balloons... James Turner’s spare set design for Rania Jumaily’s production of Adam Barnard’s new play buckets may possibly reflect straitened circumstances at the Orange Tree, since the theatre is (for shame) no longer in receipt of regular Arts Council funding.

But, with its suggestions of the festive and the funereal, the mischievous and the melancholy, Turner’s simple, sparse design actually provides an ideal ambience for Barnard’s play, which touches on Big Themes - memory, mortality and the moments that shape and define human lives - in a mostly merry, ludic manner.

 

An alumnus of the Orange Tree Trainee Director scheme 2003-4 (he’s directed Torben Betts’s The Company Man at the OT, amongst other shows), Barnard has increasingly turned his hand to writing in recent years, and his short play Closer Scrutiny was a memorable part of the Orange Tree’s great Festival last year, an extravaganza that was one of 2014’s theatre highlights for me.

buckets, Barnard’s first full-length play, is a very different proposition, however. The action here unfolds in around thirty scenes: some super-short sketches, others more sustained narratives. In them, a talented multi-tasking sestet of performers - John Foster, Tom Gill, Charlotte Josephine, Sarah Malin, Rona Morison and Sophie Steer - zip through multiple roles and scenarios that range from the realist to the absurd, incorporating elements of soap opera, surrealism and even sci-fi. Doctor/patient and teacher/pupil duologues, an ailing teen’s encounter with a pop star, a suicide attempt that gets interrupted by a mugging… these are just some of the many incidents that the play presents as it explores time and the transience of human experience.

 

With dialogue unattributed, the number of cast members unspecified, and a flexible approach to staging advocated, the form of Barnard’s play owes a rather too obvious debt to selected Caryl Churchill works, notably 1978’s The After-Dinner Joke (itself revived at the Orange Tree last year) and 2012’s Love and Information. But it’s a friendlier piece than either, and while some sections fail to ignite or feel half-baked, others prove engaging and effective.  

 

Much of the appeal of the evening is down to the cast, who, barefooted and casually clothed, work together wonderfully well. Malin’s metamorphoses into a stroppy teen and, later, a parent bemoaning her daughter’s lack of rebelliousness are especially choice, and Foster is just wonderful in a lengthy sequence in which his character expresses curiosity about  the longevity (or otherwise) of the existence he’s been assigned under a so-called “Living Vessels Incorporated” scheme.

 

There’s a slightly calculated eccentricity to the production that might grate on some, and a few a cappella musical interludes add disappointingly little to the experience. But, moment by moment, there’s much to delight and surprise in buckets.

 

Booking until 27th June. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

 

 

Theatre Review: Each His Own Wilderness (Orange Tree)

Clare Holman and Susannah Harker in Each His Own Wilderness (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

Following on directly from Paulette Randall’s piquant production of Mustapha Matura’s Play Mas [review here], Paul Miller’s first Orange Tree season (now sans regular Arts Council funding, for shame) offers another superb rare revival of a Royal Court-premiered play. This time out, Miller himself is directing Doris Lessing’s Each His Own Wilderness, in the play’s first major production since its debut at the Court in 1958. It proves to be another occasion to celebrate, for Miller’s is an arresting, razor-sharp revival of an absorbing, provocative piece, illuminated by terrific performances, including two – from Clare Holman and Joel MacCormack – that it’s worth crossing the country to see.

MacCormack plays Tony, a 22-year-old who, following the completion of his National Service, returns to the family fold to find his widowed mother, Myra, shacked up with a guy his own age: moreover, Myra’s young man, Sandy, happens to be the son of her own best friend, Milly. Swearing and trouser-wearing, Myra, it soon emerges, is a sexual and political radical - her current cause is protesting the H-Bomb –who views Tony’s anti-activism stance as disdainfully as he views her commitment to causes. The conflicts that erupt between the pair – exacerbated by the appearance of Myra’s other ex-lovers and by Milly’s return from the Far East – point to a wider schism between the generations in terms of sexual and political attitudes.

Objectionable as it may be to speculate, Lessing appears to have been working through some very personal emotions in Each His Own Wilderness, particularly in relation to motherhood and the legacies of her left-wing political engagement.  The result is a fascinatingly conflicted work that pulls the viewers’ sympathies every which way. No precursor to the awful, accusatory blame-the-baby-boomers dramas that were so prevalent a few years ago, the play is remarkably even-handed in its treatment of its characters, none of whom are demonised and all of whom we may see as foolish and wise, selfish and admirable, at different moments in the piece.  

The play’s tone is as slippery as its allegiances: Lessing’s writing combines epigrammatic wit with moments of Ibsen-esque intensity, and there’s even a slight flirtation with farce before a truly wrenching climax. And if some of the political chatter feels a mite forced on occasion, the play brilliantly reveals the vexed complexities of its period, a time that’s all too readily diminished as merely drab or uninteresting these days. Cynicism versus belief, the advocating of revolution based only on particular models,  sincere concern for the world’s future marred (or is it?) by moral compromise in one’s personal life, the spectre of the Spanish Civil War, the crimes committed under Communism  … Lessing explores all of this in a rich and relatable way.   

Joel MacCormack in Each His Own Wilderness (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

At the play’s centre is a troubled mother-son relationship, with inevitable echoes of Hamlet, Ghosts and, especially, The Vortex. And Holman and MacCormack are simply sensational as they reveal the depth of Myra and Tony’s ties of loathing and love for each other. Astutely designed by Tom Roger, the production also feels fully inhabited across the board, with great work from John Lightbody and Roger Ringrose as Myra’s other suitors, from Josh Taylor as the ingratiating, calculating Sandy, and from Rosie Holden as a bewildered girlfriend brought into the fray. And though it’s something of a challenge to imagine Susannah Harker’s bodacious Milly travelling Asia to aid peasants, Harker is a striking presence, especially in a memorably brutal post-coital scene.

Lessing’s play sometimes seems a bit too pleased with itself for its own sexual frankness and daring. But its intelligent, insightful and complex examination of two generations’ disillusionment with each other succeeds in getting under the skin.

Booking until 16 May.

Theatre Review: Play Mas (Orange Tree)

Melanie La Barrie and Johann Myers in Play Mas (Photo: Robert Day)

Debuted at the Royal Court in 1974, when it won its writer the Evening Standard’s Most Promising Playwright Award, Mustapha Matura’s Play Mas now receives an absolutely top-notch revival by Paulette Randall at the Orange Tree as the latest gem in Paul Miller’s hugely successful first season.

Matura’s play treats the subject of Trinidad’s independence in two Acts. In the first, the action unfolds in the late 50s, in a Port of Spain tailor shop owned by one Miss Gookool. Here Samuel is an apprentice working with Miss G’s garrulous son Ramjohn, who has his own very particular philosophy of suit-making. Carnival is coming – to the delight of Samuel and the disdain of Ramjohn – and so are stirrings of political unrest, led by the PNM's charismatic Eric Williams. In the second Act, taking place a few years later, Samuel has become Commissioner of Police and calls Ramjohn in for a favour. In between, independence has indeed come to Trinidad, bringing with it new political challenges, as student “terrorists” object to the State’s decisions and its pro-American policies.

Robust, witty and generous in its language, and highly astute in its exploration of identity politics and carnival (as  genuine transgression or colonialist construct), Matura’s play is ripe for rediscovery. And Randall’s vibrant production leaps off the stage, boosted by a terrific design by Libby Watson (including some  truly fabulous costumes), well-judged music selections, and superb work from the cast.

Determined to keep politics out of her shop, even as she snaps at her staff and son and fawns over an Englishman (Rob Heanley), the brilliant Melanie La Barrie manages to make the no-nonsense matriarch Miss Gookool more deeply sympathetic than simply shrewish. Victor Romero Evans is vivid as a philandering neighbour  and brilliantly pulls off one of the play’s most bravura interludes.  Lori Barker contributes a priceless comic cameo as Samuel’s demanding wife.

And as the colleagues whose relationship is at the centre of the piece, Johann Myers as Ramjohn and Seun Shote as Samuel establish a beautiful rapport, whether shooting the breeze over films (the play contains some truly delectable movie-based chat) or subtly conveying the big shift in power in the characters' dynamic. Only the production’s final moments are perhaps a little too subdued, lacking the needed punch. But this remains a thrilling and absorbing evening that’s not to be missed.

Play Mas is booking until 11th April. Further information at the Orange Tree website.
 

Theatre Review: Widowers' Houses (Orange Tree)

  

In his seminal Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, Raymond Williams’s dismisses George Bernard Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses - the playwright’s 1892 play on the subject of “slum-landlordism” - as “a crude intrigue melodrama, mechanically contrived to be explicitly rhetorical about slums, and to involve everyone on the stage in a condonation of criminality.” The play, the critic contends, is “very thin stuff.” But such complaints aren’t borne out by Paul Miller’s strong, spry, swift production, just opened at the Orange Tree, which makes a good case for the play as a work of much greater interest and appeal than Williams’s remarks suggest.

  

The play, Shaw’s first, addresses the moral quagmire faced by the young Dr. Harry Trench, when he learns that the father of his fiancée makes his money from exploiting impoverished tenants. But as the drama weighs the perspectives of its protagonists – from the landlord Sartorius, the fiancée Blanche , the agent Lickcheese and Trench’s prissy chum Cokane - it gradually becomes apparent - in true ironical Shavian fashion – that Trench himself is much more deeply implicated in the exploitation than he would have imagined.

  

As an investigation of London’s housing problems, Widowers’ Houses doesn’t lack for timeliness or contemporary relevance. Starting out as highly mannered, epigram-heavy comedy of the English abroad (casually xenophobic and forever consulting their Baedekers), the piece gradually moves into darker territory, showing all of its characters to be motivated by financial concerns. The ironies aren’t subtle, but they are pointedly and thought-provokingly made, though the play trips up a little in its final stretch, which includes an unlikely transformation for one character.

  

Miller’s production finds exactly the right tonal balance for the first two Acts, though, and is aided by the efforts of a great cast. Patrick Drury’s Sartorious combines affability with quiet steeliness and menace to compelling effect. Stefan Adegbola does delicious high style comedy as the pompous Cokane, forever taking Trench to task for his lack of “taste” and “tact”. Alex Waldmann, as Trench, subtly shows sweetness and social conscience morphing into spinelessness. And Rebecca Collingwood makes an absolutely terrific professional debut as the pert, unpleasant Blanche, expressing her hatred of “the poor” and memorably turning on her maid (Lotti Maddox) with startling ferocity. Not a play without some flaws, then, but this is a fine, funny and intelligent production.

  

Booking until 31 January. Further information here.

Theatre Review: Pomona (Orange Tree)

  

Having kicked off his first season with two fine productions of a determinedly realist, domestic nature – one (The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd [review]) a classic; the other (The Distance [review]) contemporary - Paul Miller now ventures into considerably weirder, wilder terrain with his third offering as artistic director of the Orange Tree.

  

Named for a mysterious locale in the middle of Manchester (an empty lot that used to be a dock; a “hole in the heart of the city,” if you will) and exploring urban unease, ignorance and alienation with wide-ranging allusiveness and plentiful injections of the surreal, Alistair McDowall’s Pomona has already generated considerable online hype: enough to entice theatregoers who’ve previously taken zero interest in this venue over the years. And even those of us who feel that the show doesn’t quite live up to the build up (or to the wildly over-effusive praise that followed Friday’s press night) would be hard-pressed to deny the ambition of this erratic but consistently intriguing piece of writing, the impact of which is much enhanced by Ned Bennett’s arresting production.

  

In interview, McDowall has identified a bewildering array of intertexts and inspirations for Pomona, from Faulkner, Fellini and Foster Wallace to Flannery O’Connor through Buster Keaton, Pokémon and Dungeons and Dragons. Overlooking the (rather more obvious) debts to Simon Stephens and Sarah Kane that the piece exhibits, it’s video games that have clearly had the most direct impact upon the play both formally and tonally, and which give the evening much of its excitement and novelty value.

  

Like many an RPG, the play pivots upon a quest narrative of sorts, one based around a girl called Ollie (Nadia Clifford) and her search for her missing sister. “Lot of talk about people disappearing. Pomona’s a place that finds itself in those conversations,” reveals a character early on, and Ollie’s quest is interwoven with various other narrative strands – among them, those involving a testy procuress, a runaway wife and two “security guards” charged with undertaking a killing – as the drama builds up to a jagged, jittery portrait of the multiple kinds of maltreatment and maleficence occurring in the metropolis.

  

For better and for worse, Pomona is every inch a young man’s play. It’s show-offy, self-consciously “edgy,” paranoid about power, and it offers a modishly grim vision of a society based on exploitation, violence and abuse (prostitution, porn, trafficking and snuff are all evoked at various points): the kind of vision that tends to get some critics very excited indeed. “Everything bad is real” declaims a character at one point; other proffered pearls of pessimism include “[t]he whole world hates women,” and a definition of life as “built on [a] foundation of pain and shit and suffering”: “a cycle of shit…A drowning in oceans of piss.” Well … shit.

  

With a looping, non-linear arrangement of scenes, McDowall works hard to ensure that there’s no chance at all of a viewer fully grasping the piece on a first viewing, either. And it’s only through reading the play afterwards that I began to make connections between characters and events which remain frustratingly opaque in performance. As a puzzle-play the piece lacks the concealing-and-disclosing elegance of a work like Ana Diosdado’s amazing Yours For The Asking, which was performed at the OT in 2012. Elegance, clearly, is not Pomona’s intended effect, but there are problems, I think, with the way certain scenes here fail to connect and achieve their full resonance.

  

But for all its overt pretentions, willful obfuscations and irritating digressions (an opening riff that attempts to do for Indiana Jones what Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns did for The Simpsons; a later semen-focused fantasy), Pomona is also a work of some genuine vision, and Bennett’s production helps to uncover its stronger aspects for the most part. Technically, the production is truly terrific, with a great lighting design by Elliot Griggs - flickering neon and sudden plunges into darkness - and choreography by Polly Bennett that sometimes sets the seven-strong cast in motion like so many online avatars. The roughing up of the repertoire also extends to the roughing up of the auditorium with Georgia Lowe’s spare design creating a pit in the stage where the protagonists confront each other.

  

The staging supplies several electrifying images, aided by the intimacy of the OT’s space. And Bennett also shows his adroitness by knowing when to cut back the flashiness and bring the proceedings to a quieter, more subdued place, too. One of the most haunting episodes is a hushed encounter between two characters – the one a victim, the other a perpetrator of abuse – that’s expertly rhythmed and performed to perfection by Rebecca Humphries and Sean Rigby. The ending of the show, however, feels oddly limp.

  

By turns brilliant and baffling, silly and scary, Pomona will be a big hit. In terms of mood, language and attitude it’s precisely the kind of play that a lot of people are desirous to see right now. A great deal of calculation has gone into it, and in my opinion the end result is more artful than genuinely insightful, ultimately. Nor is it correct to say (as some ill-informed tweeters have been saying) that this is a play that’s single-handedly “revitalised” the Orange Tree repertoire: the programming at this venue has always been much more adventurous than the media has chosen to recognise, with the last year alone seeing plays by Caryl Churchill, David Mamet, and Stephen Sewell performed, not to mention a wide-ranging Festival dedicated entirely to new writing. Still, Pomona looks likely to represent a turning point in perceptions of the theatre, and confirms McDowall as a writer to watch. The piece offers much to admire, much to take issue with. But it’s a show to see, and to argue about.

  

  

Pomona is booking until 13 December. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

  

Theatre Review: The Middlemarch Trilogy: Fred and Mary (Orange Tree)

 

Photo: Robert Day

Following Dorothea’s Story and The Doctor’s Story, the Orange Tree’s absorbing Middlemarch Trilogy concludes with Fred and Mary. It’s a lively, fetching and fond finale. While the previous instalments took as their principal focus the novel’s two famous miserable marriages (those between Dorothea and Casaubon and Lydgate and Rosamund), the last part of Geoffrey Beevers’s adaptation offers a counter of sorts by honing in on one of the text’s more peripheral - and, ultimately, more affirmative – relationships: that between Rosamund’s brother Fred and Mary Garth, daughter of a land agent and nurse to Fred’s uncle Featherstone. Another pair of contrasting types, Fred and Mary’s is a union forged in childhood that’s being renegotiated in adulthood. It’s challenged by Fred’s fecklessness, as he abandons his university studies, flirts with entering the Church, and counts on a legacy from Featherstone to get him out of his debts – an inheritance that Mary inadvertently ends up thwarting.  

If Beevers was intimidated by the prospect of adapting Middlemarch for the stage, then he hasn’t let it show. His respect for the text is plainly evident in his faithful replication of Eliot’s language, both in the dialogue interludes and the authorial commentary that’s shared, beautifully, by the cast as choric commentators. But he also treats the novel lightly, and a bit irreverently, clearly enjoying the challenge of translating its broad social picture into a tiny theatre. As my response to Dorothea’s Story demonstrated, the often cheeky approach takes a bit of getting used to. But by this third instalment it feels perfectly natural, and the production’s deft avoidance of either flagrant anachronism on the one hand or fussy period fustiness on the other is one of its most admirable qualities. And it’s fun to see Beevers continuing to spring playful surprises on us, such as the production’s presentation of Mary’s siblings Ben and Letty (which it would be churlish to reveal here).   

The attention and care that the director has put into the Trilogy continues to pay dividends in this final part, with several scenes echoing, reprising or deepening those in the previous instalments. If aspects of the political context remain sketchier than they do in the novel, the adaptation still succeeds in suggesting a community with its complex social gradations: a wonderfully-orchestrated perspective shift presents the gentry snobbily surveying the mourners at the Featherstone funeral before swiftly transforming the cast into the observed congregation itself.  

The evening is full of such swift, surprising transitions, as Beevers’s versatile cast continue to play together wonderfully well, popping out epigrammatic statements with aplomb, inhabiting a new character with the mere donning of a jacket. Lucy Tregear and Michael Lumsden come to the fore with their effective doublling as Ma and Pa Vincey and Ma and Pa Garth, revealing two contrasting approaches to life and to parenting that have influenced their children’s attitudes. Christopher Naylor fleshes out his already-sympathetic vicar Farebrother as he presents him making a difficult sacrifice. Ben Lambert renders the spoilt Fred’s post-studies lack of direction all-too recognisable and Daisy Ashford makes Mary an epitome of forthright good sense that’s never sentimentalised. And Jamie Newall – the pursed Casaubon of Dorothea’s Story – plays the ailing Featherstone with delicious relish.  

“One is constantly wondering what kind of life others lead and how they take things” ponders Dorothea at one point. The cumulative effect of these three marvellous productions is to give an inclusive sense of “others’ lives”: of the interaction of “ordinary” characters of highly contrasting temperaments, whose actions impact upon each other in ways both trivial and profound, as the evening wends its way, once more, to Eliot’s concluding tribute to “the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Playful but deep, absorbing but not ponderous, this Trilogy is another significant achievement for the Orange Tree and adds up to eight and a half hours exceedingly well spent.  

Theatre Review: The Middlemarch Trilogy: Dorothea’s Story (Orange Tree)

Photo: Robert Day 

Following Springs Eternal, the Orange Tree’s ambitious project to stage George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a centrepiece of Sam Walters’s final season gets underway with Dorothea’s Story. Writer/director Geoffrey Beevers has adapted Eliot’s text into three separate but interconnected productions which will run until February next year. Each of the three shows – The Doctor’s Story and Fred and Mary are to follow - takes a strand of the novel as its focal point and the trilogy can be viewed in any order or seen in one go on select dates from late December. As its title suggests this first instalment focuses upon the marriage of Eliot’s heroine Dorothea to the dry academic Casaubon and Dorothea’s gradual, growing attraction to Casaubon’s younger cousin Will Ladislaw. And while the production has some shortcomings, at its best it’s a distinctive, highly theatrical adaptation, and an engaging and promising start to the Trilogy overall.

Beevers has form as an adaptor of Eliot: his takes on Adam Bede and Silas Marner have been staged at the OT in previous years. But, as he acknowledges in the programme essay, Middlemarch is a more challenging proposition: a less overtly “dramatic” narrative of interconnected lives in a provincial town in the 1830s, lives that Eliot explores with a scrupulous attention that the critic Kate Briggs has likened to that of a scientist examining “the tiny, interconnecting veins of a leaf through the lens of a microscope.” Eliot’s intricate focus on the interior worlds of her characters is a challenge for the stage, and it’s one that Beevers’s production attempts to meet by having the actors break off from the dialogue exchanges to speak their characters’ thoughts and feelings in third-person to the audience. This device gives the proceedings a decidedly arch tone that doesn’t always sit well with the novel’s moral seriousness: at first, the production seems more Austen than Eliot in its emphasis on irony and social comedy.

But the production’s approach becomes more beguiling as the evening progresses and the artifice of aspects of the concept (such as some early Woman in Black-style business) is transcended. Necessarily eschewing an opulent heritage take on the text, Beevers instead opts for sparseness and spryness throughout. Scene shifts are super-swift and Sam Dowson’s design conjures interior and exterior spaces with a bare minimum of props. The lights are often left up, and, between their scenes, the actors take a casual pew amongst the audience, becoming onlookers.

While this doesn’t add up to the detailed social picture that the novel (or Andrew Davies’s great 1994 BBC adaptation) provided it does allow the emotional content of the text to resonate; the dynamics of the Casaubons’s miserable marriage and Dorothea’s connection to Will are drawn with particular insight. The political context is sketchier, but the hard-working cast – by turns protagonists, narrators and observers – do succeed in suggesting a community. Georgina Strawson brings the right kind of earnestness and idealism to Dorothea, subtly engaging our emotions so that it’s a powerful moment when the character belatedly drops to the floor to weep. Jamie Newall makes the pursed cold fish Casaubon an oddly captivating presence. Ben Lambert contributes an attractive Will, Christopher Ettridge a hearty Mr. Brooke and Liz Crowther a wily, funny Mrs. Cadwallader. And throughout Beevers skilfully keeps the characters in balance so that we have hints of the dramas occurring for, say, the doctor Lydgate (David Ricardo-Pearce) on the periphery of Dorothea’s story. The evening is lengthy (another near three-hour OT marathon) but lively, and the viewer leaves eager to see the rest.

The productions are booking until 1st February. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: Seven Year Twitch (Orange Tree)

Simon Mattacks and Johanna Tincey in Seven Year Twitch (Photo: Robert Day)

Tweet tweet. If Woody Allen, Alan Ayckbourn and Mike Leigh joined forces to guest-write an episode of HBO’s In Treatment then it’s possible that the end result might be something like Seven Year Twitch, the lamely named but rather enjoyable new comedy from writer/director David Lewis, which has just opened at the Orange Tree. Like Lewis’s last play, the excellent How to be Happy, Seven Year Twitch is another relationship roundelay of marital discord, this time filtered through two key elements: psychotherapy and -yup - bird-watching. It’s a “shrink-rapt” comedy, you might say: sometimes sketchy and undeveloped, not entirely satisfying in the end, yet full of funny moments and engagingly tart exchanges scene by scene.

The plot concerns two therapists – colleagues and former paramours – and their intricately interconnected clientele. In the first scene, Megan (Lucy Tregear) is counselling the nervy Ben (Paul O’Mahony), a charity worker, who, following a confession of impotence, recounts an embarrassing incident at a dinner party hosted by Fran (Amanda Royle). The focus then shifts to Fran during a session with her analyst Charlie (Paul Kemp), in which she bemoans the obsessive tendencies of her competitive “twitcher” spouse Terry (Simon Mattacks) who’d missed said dinner party due to an impromptu bird-watching expedition. Dissatisfied with his profession these days, Charlie’s own marriage to Karen (Kate Miles) is also going through a sticky patch, wouldn’t you know. Karen is lusted after by Megan, who, at Charlie’s behest, ends up taking on Terry as a patient. Terry then falls for a fellow twitcher, Jill (Johanna Tincey). Further complications ensue.

Seven Year Twitch plays as an ever-escalating relay of comic high anxiety, in which the characters go through so many surprise shifts in erotic attachment that they could be auditioning for an appearance in an Iris Murdoch novel. Punchier and more profane than Ayckbourn, Lewis is great at depicting moments of social awkwardness. And - as the writer of a play about Feydeau - he doesn’t fear pushing the action into full-blown farce either – notably in a terrific sequence that finds Terry sheltering in a chair-hide in the living room while his randy wife enjoys herself in front of him with a new lover on the floor.

Yet Lewis’s production delivers moments of repose and reflection too; these rub up nicely against the broader episodes and mitigate the more contrived and schematic aspects of the plotting. (As in How to be Happy, a character’s classical music fixation once again helps to supply a melancholy undertow, and here allows for an understated, but very beautiful, close to the first half.) While there’s nothing very novel about the play’s notion that shrinks are every bit as screwed up as their clients, Seven Year Twitch is nonetheless at its sharpest on patient/therapist dynamics and the diverse contours of such relationships, which we see shifting, variously, from cool professionalism to irritation by way of sympathetic interest and even tenderness.



Paul O'Mahony in Seven Year Twitch (Photo: Robert Day)



The incidents described by the patients slide fluidly into flashbacks, with the same events sometimes shown from contrasting perspectives. But fortunately the play doesn’t get stuck on a tedious Intimate Exchanges/Constellations-style track of endless variations. Nor does it offer the obvious satirical stance on therapy that you might anticipate. Rather, the various theories that Megan and Charlie proffer regarding their clients’ behaviour can sound equal parts convincing and glib. Lewis allows the audience to make up its own mind on that score, and once again gives each of his protagonists a measure of awareness and self-delusion. Analogies between birdy and human behaviour crop up, but the playwright ensures that these aren’t hammered home in the way that the corny title suggests that they might be; there’s not even a shag gag to be heard.

The play’s structure means that we get told an awful lot about the characters, some of which isn’t exactly demonstrated by what we see. But perhaps this disjuncture is part of the point. After all, Seven Year Twitch is mostly concerned with the misunderstandings that occur within relationships, with faulty perception of others, and how gestures and actions can be misinterpreted. That’s the source of the play’s sadness - and also of its comedy. (One thing comes through clearly, though: however well intentioned, it’s probably never a good idea to present your wife with a dead bird - rare or not - as a peace-offering.)



Amanda Royle in Seven Year Twitch (Photo: Robert Day)



If there’s a problem here it’s that Lewis throws a few too many elements into the mix and struggles to juggle them, with the result that the play doesn’t snap together as satisfyingly as How to be Happy did. Too many traumas end up getting tossed around - abortions, alcoholic and absent parents, dead infants and a heap of Daddy issues - and some of the musings fail to convince. Charlie’s ranty theory on gender roles sounds rehearsed, while Fran’s tirade against consumerism (though better made) might have been drawn directly from Lewis’s previous play. And though all of the actors deliver sharp, well-defined performances - with especially fine work from Tregear and Royle (the latter a dead ringer for Lesley Manville here) - a couple of characters go to waste, feeling less fully integrated into the plot than they might have been.

Despite these shortcomings, there’s much to enjoy in Seven Year Twitch and much to admire about Lewis’s writing, in particular the way it doesn’t take the obvious route: the play spends a lot of time seeming to edge two of its characters towards each other, for example, and then completely subverts that expectation at the end. Relationships in Lewisland are incomplete, messy, frustrating affairs, resisting closure and final “analysis.” Still, for all the cynicism about human interaction that’s expressed, Lewis manages to end the play on a moment of possibility and openness, with the potential beginning of something. Two people face each other in a room once again. One encourages the other into intimacy with two simple, precious yet also deadly words: “I’m listening.”

The production runs until 22 June.

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: 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.