AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS
Merrist Wood, Guildford 13th – 16th July 2022 5 STARS The Guildbury’s open-air production based on Jules Verne’s fantasy/adventure novel is a miracle of invention and wit. With only his powerful faith in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide (the Bible of Victorian travellers) £20,000 in cash and his faithful manservant Jean Passepartout, Phileas Fogg, a rich, routine-bound business man, sets off to win a wager and prove to his friends that he can travel round the world using steam and locomotive power (there was no air flight at the time, despite the 20th century Disney movie of the story). There are many complicated diversions en route, and a surprise at the end. A huge undertaking — almost equal in its demands to those met by Eddie Woolrich, Guildbury’s director of this adaptation for the theatre by American playwright Laura Eason. Wisely following her advice on staging such a long and eventful journey, he creates London, Paris, Brindisi, Bombay, Hongkong, San Francisco and the boats and trains (and an elephant) between them in true theatrical style. They’re conjured up using the simplest of props, the most assured acting and the wittiest stage-management. The two main characters are brilliantly brought to life by Richard Copperwaite as Phileas Fogg and Joe Hall as Passepartout. Written by a Frenchman, Phileas Fogg is a parody of British 19th colonialism: pedantic, stiff, humourless, arrogant, prejudiced and blinkered to all but his goal to succeed — but not totally immune to modifing his outlook through encounters with the world outside Britain. Copperwaite carries this role off with tremendous commitment, contrasting perfectly with Joe Hall’s Passepartout, who is the archetypal opposite, always open to new encounters and experiences, and easily distracted! Joe’s performance as a victim of a Chinese drug den is priceless, as are his rash interventions when his master is threatened, and his gormless bewilderment in other tight spots. Jonathan Arundel as the bungling Scotland Yard detective following Fogg is a great parody of the English — always sportingly admitting ‘I deserved that’ when he’s knocked down by Passepartout! — and Amie Felton as Mrs Aouda the Indian widow whom they rescue in Bombay is suitably mild-mannered. The ensemble company give tireless support to the central characters, as gentlemen, citizens of the various cities they visit, sailors, ruffians and bureaucrats and consuls. There are wonderful moments of comedy and wit. The elephant ride stands out for me, as does the ‘human pyramid’ that Passepartout demonstrates as a circus performer. The fight scenes are great, and Fogg becoming ‘man of action’ in a storm at sea is memorably funny. I loved a brief witty reference to the red hot-air balloon of the Disney film, too. In one of the hottest July weeks of this century, we picnicked, laughed and thoroughly enjoyed this immersion in true theatre. There may be some tickets left — why not grab some of them and journey to Merrist Wood grounds this week to join in the fun? Tickets: https://www.guildburys.com/guidburys-picnic-theatre-around-the-world-in-80-daysjuly-13-16/
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 ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ — Guildford Shakespeare Company
Rack’s Close, Guildford, 16th June – 2nd July 2022 Five stars A magical feast of fun and laughter — GSC does it again. ‘If you go down to the woods today…’ you won’t find bears as in A A Milne’s song, but you will find magic all this month. Rack’s Close, Guildford’s best-kept-secret forest, is the venue for the GSC’s latest production. On an idyllic Midsummer’s Day eve we were absolutely enchanted by this scintillating ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, directed by Abigail Anderson. Anderson writes that she aims to make the story ‘clear and exciting’, and she succeeds superlatively. I’ve seen many productions of the ‘Dream’, but never been engaged so fully from the outset with the personalities and motivations of the characters in this fast-moving, farcical and intricate plot. In Scene I the exposition of the four young lovers’ relationships and problems is achieved speedily and dramatically, and Helena (Annabelle Terry) makes her stormy entrance, foreshadowing even more furiously feisty behaviour when the four become hopelessly entangled under the influence of the magic drugs of the spirits of Nature in the forest beyond Athenian civilisation. This is followed up immediately by the introduction of the Mechanicals, who provide Shakespeare’s satire on literary romantic love and the world of play-writing and production —'Pyramus and Thisbe’ — and the iconic character of Bottom the weaver (Rosalind Blessed.) We in the audience loved being cast as potential actors and cheered with the rest when Snug (Dewi Mutiara Sarginson) sat next to us and was chosen to play ‘Lion’ (later in the play the Lion was quite a star!) The main theme is the madness (and comedy) that romantic love can lead to when human society’s expectations are overturned by natural impulses (personified by the fairy court’s interference with human relationships in the forest on the magic night of Midsummer.) In Anderson’s production this modern interpretation of the reality of magic and the supernatural world is beautifully balanced with the beliefs of the 16th Century in magic, spells and sprites. The whole cast is brilliant: I’d single out for special mention the outrageously funny Bottom played with huge gusto by Rosalind Blessed; Annabelle Terry, the dangerously scorned Helena (and the hilariously assertive Wall); and Daniel Kriler, a mischievous Puck who ‘puts a girdle round about the Earth’ using some intriguing modes of transport. ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is always a comic highlight, and is so in this production, but it takes a fresh approach to bring to the climactic fight among the four young lovers the kind of knockabout comedy we saw in Rack’s Close this evening —they literally ‘tear strips off one another’! Matt Eaton’s inventive soundscapes included invisible munchkin fairies (perhaps unfairly making Shakespeare’s incantations rather hard to follow) and a very convincing dawn chorus.  ‘Albion’ by Mike Bartlett
The Guildburys at the Electric Theatre, Guildford 23rd —26th March 2022 The Guildburys carry off a complex performance: more than social comment, this is an evening about romance, loss and reality. In Albion Mike Bartlett adopts a Chekovian approach to plot and emotional theme, reminiscent of The Cherry Orchard, where a rural setting and its inhabitants are portrayed with an allegorical undercurrent. We meet Audrey Walters (Cheryl Malam), a wealthy middle-aged entrepreneur who has bought a stately pile fallen into disrepair, and who is determined to restore its gardens to the glory that she remembers from her childhood, when she spent idyllic holidays there with her uncle, who then owned it. She expects her weak, complaisant husband Paul (Jonathan Constant) and her disaffected teenaged daughter Zara (Sophie Walker), to fall in with her plans without compromise. Paul loves her enough to comply; Zara longs to be free to grow, and to return to London. Consultation is foreign to Audrey’s modus operandi; this character is consistently strident, self-centred and unempathetic towards everyone around her, including Anna, the partner of her dead son. She destroys Zara’s self-esteem and creative aspirations along with the girl’s lesbian affair with her own old friend, Katherine (Gilly Fick). Her single-minded fixation on her vision of a vanished past takes priority over all other considerations: she is willing to sacrifice all else for it. The play was first performed in 2017, during the hiatus between the Brexit referendum and subsequent diplomatic negotiations aimed at fulfilling the ‘Leavers’ dual aspirations to ‘restore’ British culture to the status of an imagined historical ideal and at the same time to create vibrant change. Audrey’s garden project results in her alienating everyone close to her (except Paul) as well as her neighbours in the community, through her selfish, possessive and ungenerous behaviour. But if you’re expecting overt political comment, you won’t find it here. I came away from this complex play with the sense that it was a portrait of a central character embodying much of the worst of English moneyed class entitlement and arrogance, who spreads destruction while believing that she is being creative. Loss, grief and broken relationships result from her inability to consult with others or to accept changes that are beyond her control. In the dialogue there’s wit and telling references to the realities that Audrey’s rigid mindset is discounting: for example, climate change means the garden’s flower beds can’t be restored to their original plan; her son’s death in Afghanistan, which she frames as a glorious patriotic sacrifice, is seen to have been pointless in the light of subsequent events there. Cheryl Malam sustains stridency and controlling self-possession throughout the play; it is hard to feel sorry for Audrey when in the last scene she insists that she will ‘go on’: we see how her attitudes will lead to further losses and alienations. However much we dislike her, she is a tragic hero in the dramatic sense. Jonathan Constant lends an endearing mildness and humour to the character of Paul. As the two ‘old retainers’, Barbara Tresidder and Kim Fergusson lighten the relentlessly tense atmosphere among the family members; Claire Howes as the bright, assertively self-confident Polish cleaner/entrepreneur is an effective foil for Audrey’s self-indulgent romanticism and Zara’s unhappy search for a meaningful role in life. Gilly Fick is colourful and strong as Katherine, Audrey’s old friend who offers Zara a role as a creative lesbian partner and whom Audrey forces to her will —and loses. Janice Dempsey  Hamlet by William Shakespeare — Guildford Shakespeare Company
Holy Trinity Church, Guildford until 23rd February 2022 Freddie Fox is a dynamic, volatile Hamlet — a wonderful evening of theatre in an amazing setting. GSC are renowned for their productions in places other than purpose-built theatres, and with this month’s production of Hamlet they have again rendered the lack of a ‘home’ theatre a positive asset to their creativity. Holy Trinity Church in Guildford High Street becomes the stage on which Hamlet, Prince of Denmark struggles with his grief, his hatred for his murderous uncle Claudius and his disgust for his mother who has married her brother-in-law, a disgust which leads to his rejection of Ophelia and his accidental killing of her father, and the final complex denouement that leaves four characters dead onstage. Holy Trinity’s beautiful interior is enhanced by imaginative lighting by Mark Dymock that creates ghosts, battles and the castle of Elsinore with minimal need for props. Directing the play, Tom Littler says that he set out to use all the opportunities that a church building offers, and this includes live music, which is woven throughout the play: organ music; the cello, played beautifully by Rosalind Ford as Ophelia; and even a recorder played ironically by Hamlet like a penny whistle, as well as exciting thunderous and atmospheric sound effects designed by Matt Eaton, that hold together the fabric and changing moods of the scenes. Freddie Fox’s interpretation of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, is febrile, passionate, ironic, brooding and ferocious by turns. He dominates the stage and the rest of the cast, whenever he appears. His delivery of the memorable speeches is intense and powerful: even that old chestnut, ‘To be or not to be’, comes alive in his mouth. We believe in his suffering and understand his cause. Equally strong is Rosalind Ford as Ophelia. Her stage presence is as powerful as Hamlet’s; her depiction of Ophelia’s descent from elegant self-possession into madness and suicide brought tears to my eyes. Claudius (Noel White) is somewhat overshadowed by his angry nephew and appears as a rather weak character who depends on tricks and schemes to seize and hold on to power; Gertrude (Karen Ascoe) seems less in love with him than some productions would have us believe; Horatio, Hamlet’s friend, is played by Pepter Lunkuse: the casting of so feminine an actor somewhat weakened the character’s role, I felt. Edward Fox (Freddie’s real father) plays the ghost of the dead King Hamlet as a disembodied voice over an evocative light display that changes the church’s furniture into flickering, supernatural images. This was a brilliant piece of theatre. Other original moments are provided when Hamlet, pretending madness, appears in a bishop’s costume intoning nonsense from the (real) pulpit, and the reduction of the ‘play within the play’ to a few moments of flickering blue light shone from behind the audience —only the reactions of Claudius and Gertrude, sitting on the stage, show what they’re watching. This is an exciting and original production of Hamlet. It’s on until 23rd February — seats are reduced In number for pandemic reasons, so book your ticket as soon as you can.  As You Like It’ by William Shakespeare
Guildford Shakespeare Company Racks Close. Guildford, 19th – 31st July 2021 What a pleasure to sit in a lush clearing in Rack’s Close woods as the sun goes down, the lights go up on actors’ expressive faces, and Shakespeare’s timeless comedy of love at first sight plays out under towering trees. The Guildford Shakespeare Company has struck gold with their ‘As You Like it’ this week. Some of Shakespeare’s most memorable speeches shine like jewels in this plot of warring brothers and a cross-dressing maiden, spiced with glorious comic business by all of the cast. The eight members of the company between them play fifteen characters, and with brilliant direction they carry all of them off con brio. Given that the plot involves peremptory exile by the absolute authority of a ruler, the setting of this production in the authoritarian state of Germany in the 1930’s makes sense. Matt Pinches is very much at home as Touchstone, a Weimar cabaret clown for most of the play, scoring points, flouncing, teasing and occasionally sulking hilariously, in black tights, tinsel mini-skirt and red high-heels. As Jaques, the philosopher in the forest community, Sarah Gobran’s moving delivery of the famous speech known as ‘The Seven Ages of Man’ holds us spellbound. She’s terrifying as the cruel Duke in the first act, and comically charming as Phoebe, a shepherdess who falls in love with Rosalind thinking she’s a boy. Tom Richardson, as Phoebe’s rejected swain Silvius, is lovably gullible, and Corey Montague-Sholay as the other bucolic lover, Audrey, brings out all the comic potential of his rustic overalls when he’s teased by Touchstone. Rachel Summers and Natasha Rickman bring giggly girlishness to the roles of the two best friends, Celia the Duke’s daughter and her cousin Rosalind, who run away together to the forest after the Duke throws Rosalind out. Comparing notes about boys, they fill the woods with their enthusiastic screams, see-saw moods and lively scamperings. Natasha Rickman with Rosalind’s passionate, barely held-back longing creates a steamy connection to James Sheldon’s confused Orlando who believes she’s a boy. Her comic timing is faultless. Robert Maskell’s accomplished performances as the banished Duke Senior and separately as Corin, the shepherd who tries his wit against Touchstone, are very engaging: he brings both joyfully to life. Memorable moments include the scene when Rosalind, still disguised as a boy, tells all the tangled would-be lovers that they will be married tomorrow but she herself ’will marry no woman’ — the choreography of this scene is irresistibly funny. Don’t miss this wonderful chance to enjoy live theatre in a beautiful glade — The Guildford Shakespeare Company have again filled warm summer evenings with laughter and magical art. Tickets and information about the cast are here. This review was first published by Essential Surrey online magazine https://www.essentialsurrey.co.uk  Comedy with bite, farce with an edge, a great night out after so long away from live theatre.
Only Alan Ayckbourn can make me writhe with embarrassed laughter — and recognition — with each turn of phrase and plot. ‘Absurd Person Singular’, written in 1972, presents us with three consecutive Christmas Eves and three of the couples from whose social pretentions, misogyny and sheer mutual incomprehension Ayckbourn has so often derived farce and ironic tragi-comedy. Christmas Eve — the kitchen of Jane and Sidney Hopcraft (Felicity Houlbrooke and Paul Sandys) is the control room of Sidney’s strategic cocktail party, which should set him on the path to financial success, from the low base of his small corner shop. He is the commander and Jane the cringing subordinate responsible for all practical arrangements. ‘Don’t let me down, Jane’ is his bullying refrain. Jane struggles farcically to cope with the pressures of ‘keeping up appearances’ while entertaining social ‘betters’ on whom their ambitions depend. Timid, humiliated and scorned, she develops in the final act to become, literally, a gleeful echo of her husband. Paul Sandys as Sidney brings out all the nastiness and amorality of the character whom we will experience with amused horror in the last act. In the Hopcrafts’ kitchen we meet Eva and Geoffrey Jackson, clearly not in control of their lives. Geoffrey is amoral and ambitious, played with flexible ease by John Dorney. Eva (Helen Keely) is broken by Geoffrey’s womanising and, as we later see, desperate for affection from her selfish, facile, drunken husband. By the third act we understand that she is now the stronger of the two. In between, her breakdown is played for laughs — she sits traumatised trying to compose suicide notes while the other couples acknowledge her only with conventional noises, talking and pursuing their own lines of thought and action in parallel with each other, everyone disconnected. Great ensemble acting as a kind of temporary teamwork is orchestrated by the ostensibly weak Hopcrafts. By Act 3 we’re starting to understand the plight of Ronald Brewster-Wright and his wife Marian (Roseanna Miles). He’s ably played by Graham O’Mara as the least obnoxious of the play’s characters, mystified and confused by his relationships with women. Marian, a patronising snob, becomes a helpless drunk; I found myself worrying for her as the Hopcrafts become winners and avengers, calling the tune in the social game Ayckbourn sets up for his characters. This is comedy with an edge. Despite the many moments of sheer farce, if we didn’t laugh so much we might cry for the characters in this parable. Comedy with bite, farce with an edge, a great night out after so long away from live theatre.
Only Alan Ayckbourn can make me writhe with embarrassed laughter — and recognition — with each turn of phrase and plot. ‘Absurd Person Singular’, written in 1972, presents us with three consecutive Christmas Eves and three of the couples from whose social pretentions, misogyny and sheer mutual incomprehension Ayckbourn has so often derived farce and ironic tragi-comedy. Christmas Eve — the kitchen of Jane and Sidney Hopcraft (Felicity Houlbrooke and Paul Sandys) is the control room of Sidney’s strategic cocktail party, which should set him on the path to financial success, from the low base of his small corner shop. He is the commander and Jane the cringing subordinate responsible for all practical arrangements. ‘Don’t let me down, Jane’ is his bullying refrain. Jane struggles farcically to cope with the pressures of ‘keeping up appearances’ while entertaining social ‘betters’ on whom their ambitions depend. Timid, humiliated and scorned, she develops in the final act to become, literally, a gleeful echo of her husband. Paul Sandys as Sidney brings out all the nastiness and amorality of the character whom we will experience with amused horror in the last act. In the Hopcrafts’ kitchen we meet Eva and Geoffrey Jackson, clearly not in control of their lives. Geoffrey is amoral and ambitious, played with flexible ease by John Dorney. Eva (Helen Keely) is broken by Geoffrey’s womanising and, as we later see, desperate for affection from her selfish, facile, drunken husband. By the third act we understand that she is now the stronger of the two. In between, her breakdown is played for laughs — she sits traumatised trying to compose suicide notes while the other couples acknowledge her only with conventional noises, talking and pursuing their own lines of thought and action in parallel with each other, everyone disconnected. Great ensemble acting as a kind of temporary teamwork is orchestrated by the ostensibly weak Hopcrafts. By Act 3 we’re starting to understand the plight of Ronald Brewster-Wright and his wife Marian (Roseanna Miles). He’s ably played by Graham O’Mara as the least obnoxious of the play’s characters, mystified and confused by his relationships with women. Marian, a patronising snob, becomes a helpless drunk; I found myself worrying for her as the Hopcrafts become winners and avengers, calling the tune in the social game Ayckbourn sets up for his characters. This is comedy with an edge. Despite the many moments of sheer farce, if we didn’t laugh so much we might cry for the characters in this social parable.
The original stage play of ‘Educating Rita’ (1980) is a brilliant two-hander. There may have been some in the audience at the Yvonne Arnaud who expected to see a clone of the excellent 1983 movie of the play (I sat next to one such person) but to adapt the script for the cinema Willy Russell included 20 extra characters, who are present in the theatre script but not onstage. The dialogue between Frank and Rita conjures up the situation between them and the social conditions outside the study where they speak with poignant and sometimes highly comic effect. This is wonderful writing.
The scene is the room in a respected university where Frank, a middle-aged professor of English, meets with Rita, a young Liverpudlian hairdresser who has applied to follow an Open University course. Rita wants to “know everything” and so to move her life out of the track in which she feels her family and social class have trapped her from birth. Their relationship swings back and forth in “snapshots” of their successive meetings. His wonder and somewhat patronising perception of her naïve and emotional responses to the books the course demands her to read, and her awe for his middle-class academic world, give way to a more complex relationship as she begins to see herself as “educated.” This is a sparkling comedy as well as an exploration of class and gender conflicts. It’s full of wit and irony from both student and professor: Rita’s sharp Liverpudlian humour bubbles and sparks in every scene, while Frank’s ironic view of himself and his own weaknesses is a great foil for her edgy, nervous self-deprecation. The process of educating Rita changes the lives of both, in ways that finally remain open to the audience’s speculation. And so the cast of two are onstage for the duration of the play, and in this production they seem to me to bear that responsibility admirably. Stephen Tomlinson is not Michael Caine and makes no attempt to emulate him. He is the cynical, tired lecturer who has found himself divorced from his first love of literature; he glimpses in the uneducated, raw reactions of Rita a charm and honesty that the students who come to him through the traditional education system learn to suppress, in favour of learned responses from ‘recognised sources’. Jessica Johnson is Rita, spontaneously affectionate, easily overawed but made gradually confident, above all by mixing with other students at the OU Summer School which is part of her course. Her stage presence is joyfully active, veering from literally bouncy when Rita is happy, to angrily sullen when she feels put down, so that her physical equilibrium at the end of the play tells its story. The play was written forty years ago, yet it hasn’t dated. The English class system remains rooted in 2020 as in 1980 and academic mores also endure. And in spite of advances in gender equality, many women’s options remain as limited as Rita’s, without a conventional education. This review was originally published in Essential Surrey Magazine https://www.essentialsurrey.co.uk/theatre-arts/theatre-reviews/educating-rita-review/ Book Review: What I heard on the Last Cassette Player in the World by Ben Ray (Indigo Dreams)17/12/2019 What I heard on the Last Cassette Player in the World
Ben Ray (Indigo Dreams) Ben Ray’s second collection is a medley of experimental poems alongside absurd, surreal propositions apparently thrown out ad lib, and sincerely felt and expressed meditations on political, environmental and existential themes. He is a master of the sustained metaphor, as in ‘The day they decimalised the words.’ He plays with the historical event of currency decimalisation in Britain in 1971, showing how cultural change impinges on meaning. With the currency of old words suddenly devalued, the elderly struggle to adjust, are confused and disenfranchised: “The older generation, they didn’t understand – they cried when they opened their mouths and their old, familiar sounds wouldn’t work.” And even young people feel a “nagging, empty sadness / for everything that had been left unsaid” and the “now-strange symbols” they see when they find old words “tucked in between the leaves of books / or carefully hidden on stained shopping lists.” Foreign places and past times inspire other poems that deal with change. In a sequence entitled ‘A short guide to Sengoku period Japanese pottery’ Ray follows the violent evolution of Korean pottery into traditional Japanese porcelain design through the enforced abduction of 20,000 Korean craftsmen and artisans by the Japanese, in the Ceramic Wars of 1592 –1598. This is a very beautiful poem, with the understated grace of an oriental art work. An artisan tells of the violent uprooting of their life in stanzas named for the processes of their craft: ‘Throwing’; ‘Centring; Opening up’; ‘Firing’; Glazing’; ‘The finish’. In ‘Throwing’, the opening stanza, the narrator. totally in tune with their art, describes how “When first placed on the wheel of Korea / I was thrown most delicately”: “clay ran like love in my family’s veins.” In ‘Centring’ the war approaches until there are “soldiers/ wading through shards of villages.” The potters’ disturbance in their work is ironically shown: “When you make a bowl and you are briefly distracted by, say, a dog in the workshop or the murder of one’s mother…” And so the story goes on: “Twenty thousand pieces taken from their home / is a rape, a murder.” The Korean craftsmen were taken “in the hope that some of us could be reshaped /and learn to echo the contours of this strange new island.” The assimilation is almost completed, as the pot is fired and glazed: “The longer a pot is dipped in the glaze / the more the colour settles,/melting into grooves now familiar.” “And now, here we are not quite Kinsugi but nearly there – the shine on us has set hard…” The narrator keeps his pride as an individual artist, however: the ceramics are now exported globally as traditional Japanese art but the narrator insists: “I like to think that they were not born of Korea or of Japan but of us…” Welsh places have inspired some of the best poems in the collection. One is another sequence: “Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal”. In six segments Ray maps the changing nature of the canal and its banks in engaging detail, from its beginning “poured out of the Brecon basin in a feisty swirling shaking liquid rush” until in stanza 6: “Like all empires, the canal does not lead to glory it leads to obscurity and silence and rubble…” ‘The Landsker Line’ plays with “the distinct linguistic and cultural boundary between the Welsh-speaking areas of northern Pembrokeshire and the English-speaking areas of southern Pembrokeshire.” (Ray’s epigraph) This is not about the landscape, but a map of the dialects that remain as traces of historical skirmishes, military and linguistic, between the English and the Welsh cultures: “Brandy Brook an anglicised battle line the next beach north a fighting statement: Pen-y-cwm. To trace it you will need a phrasebook and the voice of your grandfather time clots and cloys in the breaths between sentences.” “Morning After” carries a cynical epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke about the city of Rome. In Ray’s response, the extant remnants of the Roman Empire are redrawn as the features of an aged actress, irrelevant to the present day, though still demanding attention: “Time, the great undresser, long ago got wise to your amphitheatrics and confiscated your frescoed chic – left with mosaic rashes, like old tattoos…” Ray’s enjoyment of sounds and mild punning is in the rhyming of “amphitheatrics” with “mosaic rashes” – it works for me in this poem. though not in all. Not beyond politics and environmental themes, but encompassing them, the narrator’s personal memories leaven the collection: I enjoy ‘Hay Bluff’, a memory of a climb with his father to look down over the River Wye; ‘The Gift’, a memory of his father’s humanity; the bleak “Winter at the Sands Café, Newgale. In “Some Other England”, a memory of Morris dancers (“Morris with a darker touch,/ faces that interchange like birds in flight”) who seem to “solve this internal conflict / and reach into some other England” picks up again the dominant theme in this varied collection: the fall of empires and how human beings adapt to cultural change. Janice Dempsey December 2019 First published on https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=97913  “Ten Times Table” by Alan Ayckbourn
Yvonne Arnaud Theatre 3 stars I laughed a lot! This ‘romp’ takes a side-swipe at extremes of class and politics, highly relevant today. As a huge fan of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays, I came to “Ten Times Table” expecting surprises, wit and playful baiting of the English class system. The play’s scenario is perfect for that: a self-appointed committee in a small English town, planning a ‘festival’ to celebrate an 18th century local confrontation between land-owners and land-workers. Over the course of their weekly meetings the team-work their optimistic, peace-making chairman hoped for falls into chaos and farce ensues. (I assume that the title of the play refers to their ten meetings round the table in the dilapidated ballroom of the Swan Hotel.) The cast of characters is pure Ayckbourn: the fussy, pedantic ex-lawyer Ray (Robert Daws); Eric, the weak “lefty” school teacher with a chip on his shoulder (Craig Gazey); Lawrence, the drunken businessman with a failing business and a breaking marriage (Robert Duncan); Helen the Thatcher-like virago, (Deborah Grant); young, susceptible Sophie (Gemma Oaten) and Philippa (Rhiannon Handy), and the chirpy, peace-making chairman of the committee, Donald (Mark Curry). Add to this list Audrey (Elizabeth Power), the ancient deaf lady assigned to take minutes, and Tim (Harry Gostelow) the aggressive right-wing ex-military farmer who’s co-opted to move the planning forward when the committee’s stymied as such committees often are, and the stage is set for the confrontations of politics and class that Ayckbourn uses to poke fun at all the stereotypical views of his caricatures. Some of the funniest moments of the play are provided by Mark Curry as the hapless chairman of this dysfunctional committee. His balletic body-language and almost operatic delivery of attempts at reconciliation between warring committee members are brilliant – “We-e-e-e-e-ll … no-o-o-o-w!” Elizabeth Powers as Audrey is also a delight: necessarily side-lined by deafness, her attempts to understand what’s going on are touching, familiar and funny. I enjoyed the evening and laughed a lot. I did feel that the play itself was a little static visually, until the last scene presented the farcical outcome of the deliberations of the committee. That said, the performances of all the cast were suitably exaggerated, in keeping with the author’s evident aim of presenting the characters’ stereotypical responses to the situation and to each other, so the pace didn’t drag. Alan Ayckbourn says of this play, “In more innocent days, it would probably have been subtitled a romp”. First performed in January 1977, with Margaret Thatcher poised to become Prime Minister three years on and several years of social and union unrest behind, Ayckbourn takes a sideways swipe at both ends of the political spectrum and all levels of the English class system, positioning himself as “the man in the middle” of the chaos. And yes, it is a romp! Janice Dempsey |
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