2018 Directors' Festival 1 and 2

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 13 July 2018

The Orange Tree Theatre, in partnership with St Mary's University Twickenham, is presenting three short plays directed by graduates of the MA program developed by the two institutions, in the second year of their partnership.

1. Katie Johnstone, by Luke Barnes, directed by Samson Hawkins

Katie Johnstone (an impressive Georgia May Hughes) is a teenager with dreams - dreams of doing good in the city which she loves. She will become a millionaire and then a benefactor, just as soon as she finishes night school (to retake her school exams) and sets up her first business (she spends her grandmother's inheritance on purchasing Sky remotes on E-bay to sell on at a profit - a disastrous idea). In the meantime her friend Jackie pursues a less ambitious course, and her mother wants her to get a paying job to help make ends meet (both parts, and other female characters, played by Kristin Atherton) while Jackie's father (Reuben Johnson, also playing other men and a fox) agrees to let her help him in his council gardening job.

Katie has blistering self-confidence, and a desperate determination not to take on dead-end jobs or to be ground down like her mother. This is reflected in her complete control of the stage, from before the start of the play when she hands out torches to various members of the audience (pertly refusing to give one to someone who asked for one) and then issues firm instructions on how to use them, to almost the end, when her dreams have been reduced to supporting her boyfriend in what he wants to do. The idealism of youth, fuelled by sheer willpower and a sense of entitlement encouraged (if she could but recognise it) by the very society she would like to improve, carries almost everything before it, and incipient defeats merely provoke more energy and anger, until they prove too much.

The sheer energy of the performance is infectious, the audience willingly providing the torchlight for the poetry recitations, agog at Katie's self-belief and carried along by her confidence. The tentative rapprochement with her mother (once herself having perhaps comparable aspirations) is all the more touching, and even as her life takes on some of the conventional contours that she so despised, Katie's optimism shines through. The production catches these mood swings very well, and the ise of the small square stage is inventive and skilful.

2. Precious Little Talent, by Ella Hickson, directed by Dominiqe Chapman 

The play opens with a reminiscence by young New Yorker Sam (Matt Jessup) of the occasion when he unexpectedly met Joey (Rebecca Collingwood), an English girl, on a rooftop, felt an attraction, whisked her on and off a subway ride, and kissed her in Grand Central Station. Then, the scene shifts suddenly to the flat where George (Simon Shepherd) lives, and where Sam is evidently some sort of carer. The rooftop encounter is replayed from Joey's perspective, which is amusingly and cleverly different from Sam's, but just as plausible; and then to their mutual surprise they meet in George's flat: Joey turns out to be George's daughter Joanna, and George is desperate that she she should not discover the reason Sam is so much part of his reclusive life.

The play is full of misunderstanding and well-intentioned concealments, but it also has an engaging commentary on the differences between English and American approaches to social conventions. Sam often expresses himself with an American openness which Joey regards as staggeringly naive; he finds her reserve frustrating and merely evasive: this leads to moments of delicious comedy, offsetting the more serious puzzle of George's decline and his vain attempt to conceal it from his daughter, in New York on an unannounced visit as she finds her mother's remarriage and new family hard to cope with.

With excellent performances from the three actors, the production avoids the pitfalls of potential stereotyping - either of national character, or of the awfulness of a decline into dementia. Each person is trying to control the chaos - George has a brilliantly coherent speech, as if there were at last an insight to the clarity of mind that is progressively deserting him, in which he elucidates his attitude towards Joey, while the two young people in turn take up the interpretation of what they are experiencing by providing narrative commentary Joey rueful, Sam enthusiastic. Curiously, Joey's bleak realism, in choosing to refuse Sam's offer of elopement, resonates with Katie Johnstone's final recognition that her horizons are limited. It's a cautionary conclusion to a beautifully acted piece.