Four Plays by Harold Brighouse, Allan Monkhouse and Stanley Houghton
TLT and her motor sped along to the Finborough
Theatre in South West London, turned into a corner of Lancashire. A small-scale repertory
company presents four one-act plays from the Manchester School of playwrights
written between the Russian Revolution and the middle of the First World War.
Horniman's Choice is named for Annie Horniman, a scion of the Quaker tea merchant family and pioneer of British regional rep with her groundbreaking Gaiety Theatre.
Founded in 1908 and inspired by a German model - industrial Manchester seemed a
sympathetic environment with its flourishing German community - the theatre's
focus was on local new writing as well as encompassing Ibsen, Shaw, Euripides
and Shakespeare.
It toured both in Britain, with a West London base, and North America but achieved international repute with its Manchester-based plays.
And it's the theatrical Lancashire idiom which
immediately grabs attention in the first play, The Price Of Coal by Harold Brighouse, later of Hobson's Choice fame. Written in 1909, this piece combines
a conscious move towards working class and enconomic "realism" but includes elements of the supernatural and a music hall sensibility.
Anna Marsland directs the plays with precision and sensitivity
within a versatile tabernacle-shaped set furnished simply by designer Amelia
Jane Hankin, serving as coal miner's family home, a Red Cross hospital room, a
chapelgoer's living room and a weaver's cottage.
All the playwrights are linked by the British Empire cotton trade, Manchester Guardian journalism and their
association with Annie Horniman. In addition, in
an area where the Cooperative Society
has its roots, they also catered for the tastes of an audience of politically idealistic young factory workers with weekly wage packets and a thirst for current affairs.
In The Price of Coal, at crack of dawn, collier Jack
Tyldsley (Lewis Maiella) pleads his case as would-be husband to cousin Mary
Bradshaw (Hannah Edwards), before setting off for his shift, his offer to wed teasingly
unanswered.
Amost immediately, with lighting by Rob Mills
ratcheting up the tension, the tragedy
of a colliery accident, inevitable both in theatre and real life, overshadows the course of the day.
Yet The Price Of Coal is also a marriage proposal
comedy with two housewives, Jack's mother Ellen (Ursula Mohan) and neighbour
Polly Livesey (Jemma Churchill), mining disaster veterans, educating a relative
newcomer of "foreign"
extraction about mining life. That is to say, "foreign" meaning a weaver's daughter from outside the village.
This juxtaposition of melodrama, underpinned by documentary
working class reality, comedy and a wry theatricality establishes the intriguing
almost Chekhovian tone of the evening translated into Lancastrian.
It continues seamlessly with Allan Monkhouse's Nightwatches,
jumping forward in time to a First World War Red Cross hospital. An
authoritarian nurse (Churchill again) leaves a nervous, educated but sentimental new hospital orderly
(James Holmes) in his quarters on the
night shift.
Almost
immediately he's drawn into another war: Between voluble aggressive private
(Graham O'Mara) and a deaf and dumb shell shock victim (Maiella).
With an almost absurdist quality, this is arguably
the most complex and most flawed piece. Nonetheless, bringing up "pretendin'"
and "shamming", it not only deals with judgement and perception of
shellshock, but also the nature of theatre, through its clearly defined
characters and plot twists.
Struggles continue with the equally absorbing latter
two plays: The Old Testament And The New by Stanley Houghton, (celebrated for the
better-known Hindle Wakes) where the
head of the household and chapel bookkeeper (Holmes) retreats into biblical dictatorship,
when only a monetary arrangement remains after family events spiral out of
his control.
The final play is Lonesome Like, again by Harold
Brighouse (the only writer, it seems, who remains in copyright) set in 1911, the year of the National Insurance Act.
It centres on a disabled widow (Mohan), forced into the workhouse, hoping for a last-minute reprieve from the parson as she packs up her widow's weeds and Elizabeth Gaskell-like mop caps with the help of a young female factory
worker (Edwards).
Nevertheless, in
scenes threaded with social and literary references, and filled with humour,
she finds a saviour from an unexpected quarter.
Along with a carefully modulated sprinkling of music and
other sound effects by Simon Gethin Thomas, these populist yet sophisticated pieces receive full justice in this production with skilful and warm performances
by all the cast. A green light from TLT for an intricate weave of melodrama,
humour and self-knowingness.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment