The March on Russia

by David Storey

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, on 14 September 2017

Alice Hamilton directs Ian Gelder as Mr Pasmore, Sue Wallace as Mrs Pasmore, Colin Tierney as Colin, Sarah Belcher as Wendy and Connie Walker as Eileen (their three children) in this 1989 play which shows the three children visiting their parents on the day of their 60th wedding anniversary.

Each of the children arrives unexpectedly - Colin having turned up first the day before the play opens - and without consulting one another, and there are inevitable tensions simmering beneath the muted joys of a family reunion. The parents have a longstanding patter of recriminations and put-downs which are mostly comfortable but occasionally wounding; the siblings remark that they often get on well in pairs, but rarely when all three are together. Over the course of the day several long-standing resentments are aired but without the full-blown almost therapeutic release so beloved of American dramatists. Here, the crux of the matter is often deflected in a less threatening direction, so we see the pain, and the cause of the pain, but also how the person concerned most usually deals with it, and how no one single problem explains all the accumulated experience of a life. The parents can barely understand the problems of their affluent children, while the children can hardly imagine the privations of their parents in their early lives, to say nothing of the humiliations they suffered.

The play itself is wonderfully well constructed to reveal these things to us, the audience, without stretching credulity at how it is done. The cast is uniformly excellent in portraying the family - the sisters aghast but almost inarticulate when their brother describes his nervous breakdown in New York (he is a successful writer, who has bought the house his parents live in from the proceeds of one of his books), the parents oscillating between talking about their hurts and brushing them under the carpet, the unfamiliar and therefore frightening threat of dementia just beginning to rear its head. The result is an intensely moving portrait of a family coping as best it can with the encroachment of old age, the disappointment of early dreams, and the ordinary business of living. 

Once again the Orange Tree has delivered a superb production in its intimate space.

Boudica

by Tristan Bernays

seen at Shakespeare's Globe on 12 September 2017

Eleanor Rhode directs Gina McKee as Boudica queen of the Iceni (a tribe in what is now East Anglia) in this new play with Joan Iyiola and Natalie Simpson as her daughters Alonna and Blodwynn, Forbes Masson as Cunobeline and Abraham Popoola as Bladvoc, kings respectively of the neighbouring tribes of the Trinovantes and the Belgae.

The sources for Boudica's story are fragmentary, and the earliest are of course in Latin and based on a Roman point of view hardy sympathetic to a rebellious queen who for a short time posed a threat to the province of Britannia - although of course after her demise she could be safely used as a rhetorical device to point up contrasts between barbarian integrity and the corruption of the imperial court.

Against

by Christopher Shinn

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 9 September 2017

Ian Rickson directs Ben Whishaw in this new play which investigates the ills of modern society through the mission of Luke, an IT billionaire, to 'go where the violence is'. Early in his 'project' he meets the parents of a young mass-murderer, hoping to discover something about the violence and perhaps to help them come to terms with it. In later developments, we see more of the people reacting to his 'project', rather than their direct interactions with him - indeed Luke becomes, against his will, something of a celebrity figure as his journeys across America are followed by the media.

Girl from the North Country

by Conor McPherson, songs by Bob Dylan

seen at the Old Vic on 6 September 2017

Conor McPherson directs his own musical play set in a debt-ridden guesthouse in Duluth Minnesota (Dylan's birthplace) in 1934; a sketchy story from the Depression years is used as the framework for a score od Dylan's songs drawn from a wide range of his recordings, here re-arranged and sung by an exemplary group of soloists and backing singers. Principal parts are taken by Ciarán Hinds (Nick, the landlord), Shirley Henderson (Elizabeth, his wife suffering from dementia), Sheila Atim (Marianne, their adopted coloured daughter) and Ron Cook (the narrator/doctor, in a style reminiscent of 'Our Town' by Thornton Wilder).

Though not at the bottom rung of society's ladder, most of the characters are struggling to avoid it, not least Nick, the proprietor of the guesthouse, faced with impoverished guests, an increasingly sick wife, and a daughter who has fallen pregnant but is unwilling to accept the (somewhat forced) offer of marriage from an elderly (white) widower. The possibility of Nick's lover providing a financial escape once the probate from her husband's will is settled in her favour evaporates in 'Bleak House' style when costs consume the estate; the outlook is extremely grim with the presence of a gun on stage intimating the worst. However, the denouement, desperately sad as it must be, is nonetheless tinged with unexpected and moving dignity; there is even hope for Marianne as she takes up with someone who may be an escaped prisoner but who is nevertheless kind and honourable (it is noticeable but not forced on one's attention that her name is nearly Mary and his is Joseph). 

The stories are not deeply engaging, being little more than anecdotal, and the idea of a motley group of people thrown together by circumstance lends only a superficial unity to the proceedings, but all this is hardly the point. The production owes its deserved success to the wonderful songs - the lyrics are revealed to be at times heart-wrenchingly appropriate despite their familiarity - and to the inventive way in which they have been adapted to suit the situation. Add to this the skill and commitment of the instrumentalists and the singers, and the result is a poignant insight into the lyricism of Dylan's songs arising from a really entertaining ensemble piece. Curiously, the title song was omitted from the performance we saw, even though it was listed in the program, but many other songs were a sheer joy to listen to.

Yerma

by Simon Stone after Federico Garcia Lorca

seen by live streaming from the Young Vic on 31 August 2017

Simon Stone directs his own radical re-working of Lorca's play, with Billie Piper as 'Her', Brendan Cowell as her partner John, Maureen Beattie as her mother Helen, Charlotte Randle as her sister Mary, John Macmillan as her ex-boyfriend Victor and Thalissa Teixeira as her friend Des.

The original play, written in 1934, is set in rural Spain where Yerma, a farmer's wife, is unable to bear a child in a society where childbearing is central to a woman's identity and value. It is quite a jump - but in the event largely a successful one - for Simon Stone to have reset this predicament in contemporary London (with some up-to-the-minute references to current politics), where it might be imagined that the issue of childbearing is less fraught by crippling social mores. Billie Piper's character, no longer given a name, is bubbly, self-assured, flirtatious with her indulgent partner, either unaware of or unfazed by his self-absorbed approach to intimate relationships. Only as they celebrate moving into a new (large) home in an up-and-coming but still affordable part of London, and she announces that they should think of having a child, are there hints that the two might have awkwardly different views about the prospect.