Image: Daniel Cerqueira, Dona Croll, Hayley Carmichael, John Mackay in CFT’s HOME. Photo: Helen Maybanks
David Storey’s agonisingly poignant play, first seem at the Royal Court in 1970, is set in the garden of what used to be called a mental hospital – although it’s a while before we realise that. When I was growing up, there was such an institution in every area known by name and reputation to all locals. Today, of course, we look after (or not) such patients differently.
My first impression of Sophie Thomas’s set was that, filling the Minerva’s thrust it was pretty. In fact the faded ferns and big downy seed heads (like giant dandelion clocks) about to blow as the light fades at the end of the play is movingly symbolic. Each of the five characters, all of them patients, is faded and finished in some way.
John Mackay as Jack and Daniel Cerqueira as Harry are tidy in collars and ties pretending to be two successful businessmen but conversation goes round in vacuous circles of invention, “Oh yes …” says Harry about fifty times, ever troubled and often weeping. Mackay’s character constantly invents relatives who’ve experienced or achieved interesting things. No one knows the truth about anyone else.
Hayley Carmichael’s Kathleen is a forthright and cackling but pitiful suicide survivor who can’t walk properly because she’s not allowed lace up shoes or a belt. Marjorie (Dona Croll), often acidic, befriends her but has too many troubles of her own to be sympathetic to anyone else.
And poor lobotomised (yes, that was a standard medical procedure at the time) Alfred, played with gutsy sensitivity by Leon Annor is an ex-wrestler who keeps practising weight lifting with the garden furniture and trying to remove it. Even his costume is evocative. Alfred walks about in the garden in stockinged feet – worn out multicoloured socks through which some of his toes have pushed.
The impressive thing about all this is how the cast, intelligently directed by Josh Roche, bounce off and respond to each other. This must be a difficult script to manage because it’s so repetitive and deliberately banal on the surface over the surging sub texts – but this cast sustain the momentum pretty effectively.
Although some of the dialogue is funny because it’s so inconsequential – characters don’t listen to each other but of course the actors do – this is a deeply serious, uncomfortable play. I think you’d probably need to be in the mood for it. Don’t go if, for any reason, you are feeling unhappy.
Suhayla El-Bushra’s take on Andrea Levy’s (final) 2010 novel is an arresting account of slavery immediately before and after its abolition in Jamaica. It’s also a celebration of story telling and oral history in which so many narratives are laid one upon another that in the end we have to make up our own mind about truth and what we mean or understand by it.
A youngish black man, Thomas Kinsman (Syrus Lowe) has prospered and bought an estate in Jamaica – perhaps in mid-Nineteenth Century. He finds an elderly black woman named Miss July (Llewella Gideon). He has reason to believe she is the slave mother from whom he was separated in infancy. Eventually, with courtesy and respect (and a lot of food!), he persuades her to tell her story and her bent, dignified feisty figure dominates the stage from them on as she remembers her past.
Enslaved black workers emerge from sugar cane upstage (designer Frankie Bradshaw) amidst atmospheric drum led music and you can feel the heat. Each person is characterised and of course each of them is ready to rebel when the time comes. It’s multifaceted as they, too remember, often recalling things quite different from Miss July’s account. Tara Tijani is strong as the younger Miss July, whose mistress even tries to take her name and insists on calling her “Marguerite” and I enjoyed Cecilia Appiah’s hoity-toity Miss Clara.
Scenes with the white overseer and the owning family are deeply shocking. There’s a fair bit of the sort of colonial language which would have been common currency at the time including the word which is probably now the most offensively emotive in the English speaking world but perhaps the line which stood out for me came from Olive Poulet as Caroline Mortimer: “Don’t kill him. He hasn’t finished my garden”. On press night the audience chuckled and then you could almost hear a collective appalled gasp as they had second thoughts.
It’s a sensitive and very timely contribution in the age of Black Lives Matter. You simply listen, believe and feel horrified shame as you marvel at the warm theatricality of the piece.
There is, however, an audibility issue. Hard as the cast have worked on their diaspora accents with voice coaches the end result is arguably over rich for UK audiences. I missed, for example, about half of what Llewlla Gideon said, powerful as she is in this role. And the thrust stage lay out at Chichester Festival Theatre means that sometimes characters are a long way from some of the audience and facing away from them. However fine the play you can’t respond adequately if you can’t hear much of what’s said – and, for the record, I don’t have a hearing problem.
Chichester Festival Theatre’s first co-production with Lyric Hammersmith is arresting. However many times you see Martin McDonagh’s 1996 play about a mother and daughter viciously fighting their corners at home against a background of Ireland still bleeding into Britain and America, it packs a huge dramatic punch. As a gut-tearing tragedy it’s up there with the top ten.
In this production director Rachel O’Riordan makes fine use of the Minerva’s square-ish playing space so that the action moves seamlessly from upstage to downstage with little sense of fourth wall – and the set by Good Teeth Theatre connotes a shabby, lonely, small town, 1990s Irish home which is anything but cosy. Even a newcomer to the play will sense that the stove and poker aren’t being flagged up for nothing.
The emotions within that home are angry, violent, frustrated – and hopeless. We laugh at the truth of all that and at the blunt way the women speak to each other. The tragedy lies in the fact that – briefly – there is hope. Then it is snatched away.
There’s a great deal of silent communication in this production. Ingrid Craigie as Mag can tell us almost everything we need to know just by glaring or simpering. As an elderly, semi-invalid mother she should invite sympathy. Actually she is a cunning, manipulative, selfish liar. She doesn’t deserve her fate but it’s hard to feel too sorry for her and Craigie, hobbling about – and demonstrably able to do more for herself than she does because she’s lazy – gets that whining ambivalence perfectly. And you can almost smell her oft-mentioned urine infection.
Orla Fitzgerald as Maureen, the long suffering furious carer/daughter, speaks volumes through her silences by banging cups of tea and bowls of lumpy Complan down for her mother. She ensures that we really do feel for her plight. These women may be mother and daughter but there is no love, affection or tenderness between them and that’s partly where the shock of this play comes from. It’s “unnatural” but oh so recognisable when two people are thrust into a situation like this and each of them has needs which the other can’t possibly meet.
There’s a lovely performance from Adam Best as the gentle, caring, not particularly confident Pete. The scene in which he listens to Maureen poignantly explaining her feelings shows him really hearing her and it’s very moving. His letter writing soliloquy is deeply touching too. Kwaku Fortune, as Pete’s swaggering impatient, intolerant younger brother makes the best of his scenes with both the women and ensures that we see them from a different perspective. It’s a multifaceted play and this production stresses that.
Of course, the accents and dialectal syntax are strongly Irish which makes for occasional audibility problems partly because the shape of the playing space actors are sometimes facing away from some of the audience. Occasionally it is difficult to tune into the pitch of the voices but that’s a minor gripe in what is, otherwise, a meaty interpretation of a powerful play.
Photo: Gina Beck (Nellie), Julian Ovenden (Emile) in Chichester Festival Theatre’s SOUTH PACIFIC. Photo: Johan Persson
Well it certainly was Some Enchanted Evening. The press night audience applauded loudly and at length as soon as the lights went down, so delighted were they to be – at last – in a real theatre for a much-loved old favourite.
But there’s nothing clichéd about this production. Tt is different from the first note. As a fine fifteen piece band, high above the stage out of sight, conducted by MD Cat Beveridge, launches into Richard Rodgers’s evocatively scored overture, we watch an otherworldly solo ballet sequence by Sera Maehara alone on the big round thrust stage. Then she is surrounded by American GIs, marching. It’s a neat way of signalling the serious and dark cultural clash which lies at the heart of this ever topical piece.
Daniel Evans, Chichester Festival Theatre’s artistic director and director of this show, is a man of many talents – one of which is making vivid spectacular use of CFT’s capacious playing space and exploiting its revolve to maximum effect. The opening sequence was just one example of that.
Full as it is of hummable melodies, South Pacific is a profoundly political piece and this production brings that out: Racism and the need to overcome it is, if anything, more urgent now even than it was in 1949. Of course you can’t dismiss a man (or wash him right out of your hair) simply because his late partner was Polynesian. And despite, their need to repel the invading Japanese, what right have these Americans to be in this ocean paradise anyway – criticising local people and their culture?
Julian Ovenden is the best Emile I’ve ever seen. He is self-effacing, charming, attractive and, clearly, an attentive father. And that voice! No wonder his “This nearly was mine” – mellifluous, beautifully balanced and richly warm – won a massive round of applause of press night. Gina Beck is a lively match, shifting convincingly from loving to critical and from embarrassed to contrite. Her account of “I’m Going to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” is, as ever, an all singing, all dancing show stopper although I always think of Mary Martin in the original Broadway production who famously washed her hair for real on stage hundreds of time. Beck dances with a shampoo bottle and then ducks in the shower for a few drips. Radio mics (and health and safety?) have a lot to answer for.
The support cast is strong too with Joanna Ampil standing out as Bloody Mary and Keir Charles bringing oodles of character to Luther Billis. It’s good to see something which a large cast too and I note that several are recent ArtsEd graduates which is good news all round.
This sensitive show is much enhanced by Peter McKintosh’s set which consists of one hydraulically controlled balcony platform to represent Emile’s house and a series of push-on units to change scenes.
All in all a pretty remarkable achievement considering the circumstances under which this production has developed. It was originally scheduled but 2020 but had to be cancelled. Rehearsals have had to be masked and distant – and CFT has conducted 27,000 Covid tests in the making of it.
