Review Harrogate

Harrogate
by Al Smith

Father Takes Stock
https://www.hightide.org.uk/productions/harrogate#dates-and-locations

Harrogate the play started its life as part of the High Tide Festival and, after a short run at the Royal Court Theatre,  is now embarking on a national tour between 1 and 16 November: the Farnham Maltings in Surrey, the artsdepot in North Finchley, Harlow Playhouse, The North Wall, Oxford,  Canterbury's Marlowe Studio, The Garage in Norwich,  The Cornerstone in Didcot, The Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds and the Cambridge Junction

An 80-minute two hander, it stars Nigel Lindsay, last seen by us in Speed-The-Plow, as the apparent father of a 15 year schoolgirl played by Sarah Ridgeway who also doubles as wife and mother. It's received mostly rave reviews, although it strikes us as a marmite type of play.

It's set in what seems to be the family flat, designed by Tom Piper on a clinical white traverse stage (we caught it on the last day of its run at the Royal Court) with a kitchen island at one end, two equally gleaming white chairs, and a wall on which, eventually, a photo of the parents hangs on the other.

While mining with precision the relationship between a Dad and his teenage daughter,  the play nevertheless leaves a question mark continually hanging over their identities,what is true and what is not. The script ambiguously, especially in view of Sarah Ridgeway's transformation into the medic wife in the final scene, only names the characters as "Him" and "Her".

Past and present also coalesce within a sort of audit, with secrets and reveals, of the parents' marriage and their daughter's life as words and incidents repeat themselves in different patterns.

It has something in common with Blue Heart, which we enjoyed recently, with its repetitions and the acting is impeccable. In fact, it is altogether cool, glossy, clinical and slick, even at the moments when it would appear to be at its most heartfelt - and most cruel.

There's certainly tricksy quality, but maybe the clues are there. In the father's profession of reinsurance (there's quite a bit of financial vocabulary and acronyms), the language of computer games, in the unseen mother of the daughter's best friend who has forged her career in performance psychology and the rhythm of a binary computer program at work.

This felt to us a somewhat one-dimensional play and as if it could be part of larger piece; Unlike Blue Heart the repetitions do not feel true alternatives but part of a closed circuit learning process where the memory of past conversations is solely there so that the incidents and vocabulary can be rearranged.

The father's relationship with his daughter may be unhealthy or maybe it is just he cannot let go, trying to train her to be a smart machine with a degree of independence, which includes a mysterious stay at Harrogate, but always thinking she will come back to him.

There's an undercurrent of corruption in the dialogue, although it's kept deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is commercial or sexual or both TLT and her mechanical sidekick found it a little precious, as if we were going to be tested afterward on whether we'd noticed the links between the scenes - and so then writing a review of this could be a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Still the staccato rhythms are sharply delineated by director Richard Twyman and fluently performed even if its narrating style and stylized format left us rather uninvolved. It's an amber light for a clean-cut but ultimately just a little bit too regimented a piece for us.

Review Diary Of A Madman

Diary of A Madman 
By Al Smith
Adapted from the short story of Nikolai Gogol

I'm Not All Right Jock
http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/

Kids can drive you mad. But it doesn't help when generations of menfolk in your family have had a steady, never-ending job painting the Forth Railway Bridge and a penchant for inhaling the fumes of methylated spirits while they work. And you're also on prescription drugs which dull your instincts. And life feels as if you're jumping from  plot to plot taken from literature, cartoons or live-action movies.

Al Smith's loose adaptation of Gogol's classic short story sets it squarely in contemporary Scotland  where Pop Sheeran (Liam Brennan), a child of the 1960s' baby boom,  follows the family trade. Yet his fragile grip on reality, so far kept in balance by wife Marve (Deborah Arnott), is threatened by both family and outside forces.

Staged in the round at Notting Hill's Gate Theatre Christopher Haydon pacily directs the 100 minute piece. Designer Rosanna Vize has created a square dais stage surrounded by partial pipework cum scaffolding and part of the bridge's framework with paint tins and brushes suspended above. The twenty scenes are sharply delineated by Mark Howland's lighting and Alexandra Faye Braithwaite's sound design. 

Fed a strong dose of black humour, we enter the world of the Sheeran family, Pop, Marve and their daughter Sophie (Louise McMenemy). They live twenty minutes away from Edinburgh, along with Sophie's best friend Mel McCloud (Lois Chimimba), whose mother is the bridge administrator, now under Arab ownership, and whose father, with whom Pop grew up and now apparently with pretensions to Scottish nobility, sits on the Queensferry Fair committee.

Their lives are disrupted with the arrival of posh Matthew White (Guy Clark) aka Matt White, studying Chemistry at Edinburgh University, including the new long-lasting glass flake epoxy paint. Apparently the son of an engineer knighted by the Queen, Marve offers him a room, rather like the shop steward's wife and the new graduate recruit in I'm All Right Jack,  little knowing that daughter, Sophie, about to go to university herself, has already met him in the Union Bar ...

This is a  blackly humoured riff on patriarchy and a post Second World War generation ambushed by industrial and media globalization and off and online technology while still driven by the struggle for Scottish independence and competition in education and the job market.

It's a tour-de-force for Liam Brennan as the history-obsessed disorientated Pop Sheeran who loses his bearings in this brave new world where even the paint isn't what it used to be. There's a certain inpenetrability sometimes with the accents but the story remains clear. At the same time, it feels a little too long in the second half of the play and could have done with a tighter script.

Nevertheless it's a clever idea with cheeky, likeable work from McMenemy and Chimimba as the two teens aching to break out of the small town circle, as well as a strong performance from Arnott as the beleaguered but capable wife and an impressive debut from Guy Clark.  So it's an amber/green light from your Sassenach reviewers TLT and her wee automotive coracle.