When playwrights go off the rails there’s usually some nagging feeling of constraint and dissatisfaction with the straightjacket of convention prodding them on. Confusion and alarm at the collapse of everything we hold dear often follows amongst devotees of the convention and fans of the writer alike. In Caryl Churchill’s case there was no such cause for alarm as she was never really on the rails to start with; by choice she was and remains on a route of her own making.
Though by no means an early play, this double bill has the feel of someone throwing the pieces up in the air and seeing what can be made of the drop. So in Heart’s Desire, the first of the two plays, co-produced with the Orange Tree in Richmond, an ordinary, touching domestic scene of a couple (Amelda Brown and Andy de la Tour) and slightly dotty older sister (Amanda Boxer) awaiting the return of their daughter from a prolonged stay in Australia, quickly loses grip on any sense of chronological reality as the opening scene is repeatedly rewound, played, rewound, speeded up, chopped up and extruded with additions seemingly from another play. A class-full of junior school children whoop across the stage; a team of black-clothed paramilitaries bursts in to slaughter them; an unexpected guest from Australia appears and an emu tiptoes on and exits without further explanation.
Opaque as all this is, director, David Mercatali, never lets it become leaden, managing to infuse an aerial lightness – as in his previous TFT show, Radiant Vermin – which allows the excellent cast to breathe life into the characters whilst being resolutely undeterred by the lack of any apparent meaning. The play skips along as if all the goings-on were the most natural thing in the world.
The second piece, Blue Kettle, could, in another life, be the beginnings of an Ealing Comedy. A young man (Alex Beckett) with the disapproval of his girlfriend (Mona Goodwin) sets about convincing a series of mature women (the above plus Gillian Axtell, Janet Henfrey and Maroussia Frank) that he is their natural son, having been in an adoptive family since birth. The women seem all too keen to accept his story without anything substantial to back it up. So far so good, but a strange malady which, contra-Shakespeare who tends to heighten language as emotion rises, seems to reduce a person’s lexicon by replacing an increasing number of words by either ‘blue’ or ‘kettle’ with the rise in emotional intensity. This results in a kind of infantile babble. Here again Mercatali deftly keeps out of the quicksand by teasing some remarkable performances from the cast whose ages range from experienced through senior to venerable. It is rare to see so much well-seasoned talent in carefully drawn parts delivering a master-class in high-definition acting and the play would be worth seeing for that alone, but add the chance to see a neglected work by a seminal dramatist and reasons to get hold of a ticket become irresistible. ★★★★☆ Graham Wyles 27th September 2016
