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.