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: 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: 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 Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (Orange Tree)

Ellie Piercy in The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (Credit: Mark Douet)

A 7.30 start-time, numbered seating, a fresh paint job in the auditorium, new wines on offer at the bar: yep, the superficial signs of a new era at the Orange Tree are there to see pretty much as soon as you enter the theatre. And yet, taking over following Sam Walters’s amazing forty-five year artistic directorship of the venue, Paul Miller has opted to open his first season with a show that deliberately suggests continuity with Walters’s reign rather than a clear break with it.

 

By coincidence, in fact, Walters’s production of D. H. Lawrence’s 1912 play The Daughter-in-Law was the very first thing that I saw at the OT back in 2001, while Miller himself directed a well-regarded production of the  play at the Crucible in Sheffield just last year. Now, the director turns his attention to Lawrence’s 1914 work, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd. And, boasting wonderful attention to detail and an outstanding cast, it’s hard to imagine seeing this play served better than it is in the special, in-the-round intimacy of the Orange Tree.

 

Mining-focused dramas seem to be quite the rage at present, with the likes of Beth Steel's Wonderland, Chris Urch's just-transferred Land of Our Fathers  and Matthew Warchus’s much-hyped (and, in my opinion, execrable-looking) film Pride providing an interesting cultural context for another look at Lawrence’s theatre. And yet, as crucial as the pit backdrop is to The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (particularly in the play’s wrenching second half), the piece is, essentially, a thoroughly domestic drama focusing upon “a devilish married life.” (The phrase is one used by Lawrence in a 1910 letter describing his parents’ own unblissful union.)

 

Gyuri Sarossy in The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (Credit: Mark Douet)

 

Lizzie Holroyd is a harried 32-year-old mother of two suffering at the hands of a volatile spouse, Charles, who returns home in his cups most nights, on one occasion bringing “two trollops from Nottingham” (splendidly rendered by Heather Johnson and Maggie O’Brien here) with him. This incident seems to prove the last straw for Lizzie. But the protagonist’s resolve to leave her husband and get out of “this hole [where] every gossiping creature thinks she’s got the right to cackle about you” presents her with more of a moral conundrum than you might imagine.  

Though the play is not without humour, Lawrence doesn’t balk at pulling the viewer directly into a brutally unhappy marital situation. And what I admire in Miller’s production is its determined, honest refusal to sweeten the pill.  Aided by John Harris’s atmospheric lighting and Terry Davies’s mournful horn score, the production conveys the complexities of a dysfunctional relationship forged through convenience and filled with disgust and contempt, but also dependency and a kind of love. The confrontations are raw and intense, and Lawrence’s language rough and gnarled, though not without its beautiful, lyrical and rhythmic qualities.   

Ellie Piercy and Jordan Mifsud in The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (Credit: Mark Douet) 

The cast deliver that language superbly. Ellie Piercy’s captivating Lizzie is a mass of contradictions and Piercy brilliantly keeps us alert to every shade of uncertainty and resolve, guilt and grief, humiliation and hope, that the character experiences. She’s supported by beautiful work from Jordan Mifsud as the concerned young miner who offers Lizzie an escape route, and by a stunning performance from  Polly Hemingway (a dead ringer for Rachel Roberts here) as the mother-in-law who’s seen most of her menfolk perish in pit accidents and who sides with her son over his spouse (“He should never have married a clever woman”) even while acknowledging his flaws. And while, as Charles, the relatively lean Gyuri Sarossy isn’t the outsize masculine figure evoked by the other characters’ descriptions, the actor’s gruff, thickly-accented delivery helps to make a bold, powerfully physical impression.

The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd isn’t perfect in its construction: not all of the characters are fully drawn, and the ending is abrupt (the play seems to be missing a final scene). And the drama certainly doesn’t develop in a way to please the sensibilities of a modern audience. But, even so, this sensitive and beautifully judged production makes for a terrific start to Miller’s tenure at the Orange Tree.

Running time: 2 hours, with interval.

 

The production is booking until 4^th October. Further information at the Orange Tree website.