I am always sympathetic to actors trying to rescue flawed material but there’s no salvaging some works. Trespass by Emlyn Williams is hardly a masterpiece and all the goodwill in the world could not coax from me a merciful opinion of its worth. The hackneyed sentimentality pervading the piece, the insistence of validating spirituality as some sort of rational scientific endeavour, the flitting scepticism with which the central ghost story is approached – these all speak to a rather woolly and half-baked concept. And that’s not to even mention the formulaic melodramatics.
The best analogy is to take Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit and remove the wit, deconstruction, and playfulness. This is a trad séance drama of a rather dated kind and has been left out of the canon for good reason. The staging did not help though. As bad as the exposition-sequences are on their own, did the director not have a better alternative than to make characters position themselves in centre stage and deliver their backstories with fraught looks directly at the audience? And then we have the music.
It’s hardly as though using music to heighten or embellish the tone or emotion of play is a new phenomenon but Trespass does so with little grace. Lighting drops and stirring sinister music surges forth when something more subtle and ambient would have been far more effective at summoning a chill down the spine. It’s all laid on far too thick.
As I say, I hardly begrudge the actors their part in this. David Callister and Jeremy Lloyd Thomas acquit themselves best and undoubtedly have the most developed roles. Many of the other characters have singular defining features that give the actors little scope. Michelle Morris suffers the most under this as her role of Christine, who has a range of dispositions from shrill and irrational to shrill and hysterical.
I can’t fathom what the director’s approach was meant to be. If this staging of Trespass was meant to be frightening, it fails there. If was meant to engage with its interpersonal drama, the characters are far too shallow to succeed. It’s not critical or sardonic enough to be a deconstruction, and it rests too much on maudlin sentiment to function as a campy satire, for all its overwrought music. There’s no through-line here. ★★☆☆☆ Fenton Coulthurst 21st June 2017
