at the Brewery Theatre, Bristol, April – May 2014
Directors’ Cuts season is presented by the four graduating directors and features work by current acting and production students.
Mike Whitton has reviewed all four productions for StageTalk Magazine and says, “The season this year has transferred to the Brewery Theatre with great success. All four plays have had very real strengths, featuring some truly impressive performances in productions that have examined challenging issues and which have demonstrated that the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School is bursting with confidence, courage and an enormous amount of talent.”
Here are his reviews:-
DUTCHMAN
20th – 24th May
Dutchman is by LeRoi Jones, an African-American who gained great respect in many quarters as a poet, writer and political activist, but who was condemned by some for works that they saw as misogynistic, homophobic and anti-semitic. He wrote it in 1964, a time during which he was becoming increasingly involved in Black Nationalism and when he was also in the process of divorcing his Jewish wife. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that this play is confrontational, provocative and full of anger.
There are two characters: Lula, a young white woman, and Clay, a black middle-class man. He is riding the New York City subway and she comes aboard, eating an apple. He seems quiet and bookish, but she is sexy and provocative, embarrassingly forthright in her apparent desire to seduce her quiet, respectable fellow passenger. As Lula, Georgia Kerr makes very effective use of her long limbs, winding around her victim in a serpentine fashion that both bemuses and amuses him. For some time she calls all the shots, finding it great fun when she discovers him easy to manipulate; he truly seems ‘clay’ in her hands. She makes it all too clear that she can’t be trusted: ‘I lie’, she says, but he seems hooked. They agree to go together to a party, and she suggests that they will go on to her apartment afterwards. We are not at all sure that any of this is more than pretence, and the mood turns darker and more dangerous when she begins to mock his buttoned-up respectability. She accuses him of betraying his own history: ‘You’re just a dirty white man’. It is clear that seduction is not her real intent, and what follows is very far from romance. You know their journey will end badly.
Joseph Black is excellent as Clay, mild-mannered at first, and later full of violent rage. His tirade against white liberals and their ‘appreciation’ of the blues is powerfully delivered. Georgia Kerr portrays both Lula’s initial teasing and her later vicious mockery with great energy and skill. Both actors respond to the considerable demands made upon them with great conviction. For me the play itself is less persuasive, perhaps because it is so much a product of a very particular time. Cosy white liberal sentimentality and Uncle Tom submissiveness to white social norms were certainly legitimate targets for anger in the 1960s, and they may be thought to be relevant targets today, but I was left feeling that the only alternatives LeRoi Jones seemed to be offering in 1964 were polarization, confrontation and violence. Dutchman is certainly powerful, but I found its conclusion pessimistic and dispiriting. Watch it for the performances and for the snapshot it gives us of a turbulent time in American society. ★★★☆☆ Mike Whitton
Days of Wine and Roses
13th – 17th May
First written for 1950s American TV, Days of Wine and Roses will be best remembered as the 1962 movie version starring Jack Lemmon. In Owen McCafferty’s stage version it has been pared down to a 90-minute two-hander of considerable intensity.
Donal and Mona meet at Belfast airport; they are both heading for London and fresh opportunities. He has wit and charm in abundance and she has spontaneity and a sense of adventure. They are an attractive, fun couple. He offers her a drink from his hipflask which she at first declines saying, ‘No thanks, I don’t drink.’ But she will, and what follows is an almost forensic analysis of the destructive power of alcoholism. They marry and soon there is a baby boy, Kieran. Donal works for a bookmaker, but he has ambition and ability and before too long he is offered a partnership. A recurring theme is the phenomenal success of the racehorse Arkle, and it is the sound of his thundering hooves that mark the scene changes. Arkle’s spectacular achievements symbolize Donal’s dreams of a golden future: ‘Bookies live in big houses!’ he cries. But by this stage they are both drinking heavily, to such an extent that ‘self-discipline’ is ensuring that there’s a drop left in the whisky bottle for when they wake up needing yet another drink to start the day. It is Donal who faces the truth: ‘We used to glide… now all we do is stumble. We’re alcoholics.’ But Mona cannot stand too much reality and retreats into sad self-delusion.
Tom Brazier’s production demands a great deal from his two young actors and they have responded with performances of real conviction. Patrick Tolan gives a very moving performance as a man who is only too aware of how far he has fallen yet who desperately clings to some remnants of dignity: ‘Even for the likes of us there’s rules’. No less impressive is Nicola Taggart’s portrayal of a sweet young wife and mother sliding inexorably downhill to lonely degradation. At the end Arkle is dead, as dead as the notion that one more drink won’t do any harm. Gripping. ★★★★☆ Mike Whitton
The River
6th – 10th May
The River is Jez Butterworth’s follow-up to his huge success Jerusalem. The central character is an unnamed man with an intense passion for fly-fishing, and the action takes place somewhere remote, in his isolated riverside cabin. A girl enters with a copy of To the Lighthouse; she wants the man to join her in gazing at the beautiful sunset, but he refuses. Instead, he is totally absorbed in gathering together his fishing gear, for tonight is a special, moonless night when the sea-trout will gather at the long pool in great numbers. When she again pleads with him to look at the sunset he describes its colours in vivid detail, yet he is not looking, his face is turned away. Has this scene has been played out before? From this point onwards the play is permeated with an extraordinary mixture of lyricism, mystery and a gathering sense of menace. There are tales of buried children and of a mysterious woman who laughs in trees by the river. There are lies, betrayals and enigmatic moments that may or may not have significance. The writing can shift suddenly from naturalistic to unashamedly poetic; and the action at times becomes measured, even ritualistic. When the man wordlessly cleans and prepares a trout in preparation for a meal time seems to stand still.
The director Aaron Parsons has said of The River that ‘it is love that sits at its core, the honesty, loneliness and desire for it once more.’ But there is dishonesty, too, and possibly something much darker than mere dishonesty. Bethan Nash is particularly affecting as an apparently vulnerable, innocent and enthusiastic young woman given to unguarded emotional excitement, yet who surprises us with her capacity for calculated subterfuge. Phil Dunster is very impressive indeed as the charming yet controlling fisherman whose stories cannot be trusted.
At times there could be a clearer delineation of light and shade; for example, the possibilities of contrast between the two main women characters are perhaps not fully exploited. Nevertheless, this is a gripping production. There are puzzles at the heart of this play, things whose form we can only guess at, like when glimpsing fish beneath the surface. Alex Berry’s set cleverly echoes this sense of the half-seen with translucent screens, watery and mysterious. At the end we hear, hauntingly and beautifully sung, Yeats’ Song of the Wandering Aengus, which tells of ‘the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.’ This is a fittingly magical conclusion to The River, a play that leaves us to find our own answers to the many questions that it poses, but which does so in a totally absorbing way. ★★★★☆ Mike Whitton
Love Steals Us By Loneliness
April 29th – May 3rd
Katie Harris, a graduate from Aberystwyth University, has directed Love Steals Us From Loneliness, which Welsh playwright Gary Owen wrote in response to the much publicized sequence of suicides by young people that occurred in Bridgend between January 2007 and February 2009. The play does not directly address those events, but it does focus upon how vulnerable young people can be when driven by newly discovered, intense but only half-understood emotions, and how easy it is for spontaneous, thoughtless behaviour to have tragic long-term consequences.
Designer Hannah Wolfe has created a background of bent and broken wire fencing, strewn with bottles and other rubbish, but also featuring tired bouquets of flowers, a teddy bear, faded photographs; a memorial shrine of sorts. The play opens in a graveyard. Enter a young woman, Catrin, dressed as a witch. She has been drinking and she squats to pee. A young lad, Scott, comes looking for her. We discover that Catrin has had a major row with her boyfriend, Lee, and has stormed out of a Halloween party. Scott is Lee’s best friend; he accuses Catrin of playing with Lee’s affections. She responds with some decidedly strong language; their frequently very funny dialogue is strewn with obscenities, but there is a kind of tenderness beneath the tough banter. Hebe Dickins’ performance as Catrin is an immensely enjoyable, energetic tour de force. She commands the stage from the moment of her decidedly undignified entrance, and she captures the cadences of the South Wales dialect to perfection. We discover that Scott has long been in love with Catrin, a revelation which sets off a chain of events that leads to tragedy.
The first half is an exceptionally well-written two-hander, a sustained exploration of Catrin and Scott’s new relationship conveyed with robust humour and densely packed language that is by turns both crude and lyrical. The second half has a wider focus, the narrative is more fragmented, and we are introduced to three new characters. There is an abrupt shift in both style and mood, for a young man has died, and his mother invites us to ‘wave goodbye to normal’, for nothing can ever be the same again. The characters frequently address the audience directly, and at times they express themselves through music; karaoke is used to poignant effect. Milly Corser, as the mother all but paralysed by her son’s death, gives a deeply affecting portrayal of angry, stubborn grief. Yet all is not darkness and death. The play ends with a sense of hope for the future. The final mood is celebratory and life-affirming. Katie Harris is well served by her five actors. The narrative structure of the second half is challenging, but they carry off its complex interweaving of dialogue, monologue and song very successfully indeed. ★★★★☆ Mike Whitton
