Review Windows

Windows
by John Galsworthy

Through A Glass Darkly
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

What a curiously engaging patchwork of a play John Galsworthy's Windows, first performed in 1922, turns out to be!

It starts out as an obviously self-censored Edwardian drawing room London melodrama set in the aftermath of the First World War about a young woman, a figure of pathos, deflowered out of wedlock and the consequences of her pregnancy.

Yet  it finally shifts to a more caustic tone before transforming into  a play as symbolist as Chekhov's The Seagull and focussing on the mistress of the household and an international outlook.

The March family live in Highgate: father Geoffrey (David Shelley) is a newspaper pundit and otherwise a freelance writer and idealist given to muttering about "the government".

Mother Joan (Carolyn Backhouse) takes on the practical duties of running a household with a firm grasp of reality. Son Johnny (Duncan Moore) writes poetry and dreams of chivalry, a disappointed idealist and tormented veteran of three years' in the trenches while his sister Mary (Eleanor Sutton) keeps a level head and confers with her mother. 

The family employs an in-house cook (Janet Amsden), as well as another outside blue collar tradesman. Joe Bly (Vincent Brimble), an ex-seaman turned window cleaner who seems to owe something to G Bernard Shaw's Alfred Doolittle.

He has a philosophical bent and turn of phrase. This includes mulling over imperial concerns about Ireland and India. Yet closer to home, he also has a daughter Faith (Charlotte Brimble), newly released from prison after escaping hanging for smothering her baby.  .

Windows, like Just To Get Married, the Finborough's previous success, deftly weaves together the personal with national and state-of-the-world concerns, but keeps its own distinctive voice.

Geoffrey Beevers directs a measured and sure-footed production with strong performances from the cast of nine.

As Faith Bly, Charlotte Brimble is a tough cookie who eventually shows a glimpse of vulnerability but somehow, intriguingly, knows she must live up or down to a literary and newspaper stereotype.

As the men of the house, David Shelley and Duncan Moore, father and son respectively, are pipe-smoking would-be reformers in their different ways.

Yet there are sly satiric hints about both father and son in Windows, for all their high ideals about social change, just reparations and their wish to give pretty Faith a fresh start in life as a live-in parlourmaid for the March family.

Carolyn Backhouse's Joan March assumes the role of fierce gatekeeper and bears the brunt of responsbility for most matters, principally protecting her husband and son. Yet there are moments when a veil is almost drawn back. Geoffrey, and Johnny are sharply ambivalent figures even if a more tawdry undertow remains a subtle subtext.

This feels like a play sometimes more interested in weaving together issues with some unexpected combinations of the personal and the political than with the characters which are deliberately drawn as literary stereotypes.

Galsworthy in his more famous series of novels The Forsyte Saga, as far as was possible in the era in which he wrote,  often had a subtext touching on contentious subjects in a male dominated society.

Here there is a strange, deliberate scene when after an incident causes disquiet, Mrs March lets the young woman go and appears, highly unusually for a married woman at that time, to swiftly write out a cheque for Faith.

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House revolves around financial restrictions on wives but Mrs March appears to have her own cheque book and seems to believe the ex-parlour maid can cash the cheque. She also promises the young woman more money if necessary.  

Faith eventually reverts to the role of a stock melodrama bad 'un  who cannot break out of the legal personality and character the law and literature have created for her.

In so doing, she keeps the play within the bounds of the censor - but her comments retain a sharp, barbed, satiric tone which lift the play away from conventional melodrama.

There are other clues planted throughout that all may not be what it seems. When Mr Bly reveals his daughter has never divulged the name of the baby's father, he thinks "the better of her for that".

Mr March replies, "Shake hands, Mr Bly. So do I. Loyalty's loyalty - especially when we men benefit by it."

And as the short three acts continue (unusually for plays now there are two intervals), there's also a further very pleasing modern self-conscious sensibility about theatrical conventions.

The action of the play revolves around family meals and periodic window cleaning or, as Bly says, "Ah! Food and windows! That's life" or Mr March remarks in the final act, "We always seem to be eating!".

Intrigued? We certainly were, and, even if writer John Galworthy was no political radical, our interest was certainly piqued after seeing the play and reading about the circumstances surrounding Galsworthy's own marriage.

Rightly or wrongly, it planted in us a suspicion the Nobel Prize winner's wife, who had a chequered past, may herself have been unfairly characterised by others to fit a feminine and legal stereotype.

Windows sardonically examines a gamut of social and  political issues, not least how women's roles are often defined by literature and the law feeding into each other. It's a green light for a surprisingly worldly and sprightly artistic experiment with form played out over two days in a Highgate drawing room. 

Review Mr Gillie

Mr Gillie
By James Bridie

Old School
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

A  Procurator - the Scottish equivalent of the Coroner - and a judge provide a supernatural "A Matter Of Life And Death" type framework for the story of quixotic schoolmaster Mr Gillie in James Bridie's intriguing exploration of education,  theatre and community. 

Mr Gillie (Andy Secombe) is a teacher at the local secondary school in Cruit, a Scottish coal mining village, a post in the gift of the  village's parochial education committee, led by the bureaucratic Reverend Gibb (David Bannerman).

Gillie has always been an independent spirit, a chess-playing would-be novelist who married a feisty wife Kate (Emma D'Inverno) below his station. Despite losing one pupil to the Communist Party and another to prison, he is keen to cultivate the brightest pupils and lead them away from a life down the mines to the London literary world where he never succeeded.  

He has great hopes for dapper Tom Donnelly envisaging him as a Scottish poet making his mark in London and Gillie encourages him to elope with Nelly (Caitlin Fielding).

Nelly is the apparently homely but musically gifted daughter of the mercurial family doctor, Dr Watson (Malcolm Rennie). 

He is old guard, hardly welcoming the NHS, and a bellligerant toper sponging off Gillie's stock of whisky. However in the end he proves surprisingly adaptable to profiting from a new regime.

We learn of Mr Gillie's sorry fate in the play's prologue but this is no sentimental and comic  kailyard drama portraying a humble event in village life but a full-blown, if satiric, state-of-the-nation play including the state of theatre. Or rather a full-blown state-of-the-nations play - in this case, Scotland and Britain.  

First produced in 1950 in Glasgow, then transferring to London's West End, the original Mr Gillie starred long-time Bridie collaborators, Alastair Sim in the title role and his own protégé George Cole (later famed for Flash Harry in St Trinians and Arthur Daley in Minder) as Tom, his prize pupil. 

This meandering comedy drama becomes a pugnacious elegy to the passing of a literary and social era of  Victorian patronage with the institution of the Welfare State throughout the United Kingdom and a perceived post-war homogeneity, gangland and American take-over of culture with Hollywood values.  

TLT and her own highly educated jalopy couldn't decide whether the play was a tribute to or a swipe at Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams' style plays such as The Corn Is Green (later made into a Hollywood film)  and Accolade, the latter revived in an acclaimed production by the Finborough in 2011.  

Secombe's Gillie precisely catches the arrogance yet vulnerability and wilful blindness of the schoolmaster, himself. He's a product of what he views as a benevolent feudal system of poets and novelists. His surname also means a servant at a master's hunting or fishing party.

As his long-suffering wife, who fulfils the clues early on in the play of a more realistic grasp of society and her place as a woman in it, D'Inverno gives a subtle, engaging performance. Bannerman as the civil servant type and Rennie (previously in Dr Angelus)  as a traditional stock comic character quicky enamoured of new ways equally convince.

The younger generation is ably played by Cazenave Pin (last seen in After October) as Tom, transitioning smoothly into a new city and lifestyle and Caitlin Fielding embodies with equal vigour the ambitious Nelly, an aggressive seductress who could have stepped out of later Angry Young Men novels.   

Jenny Eastop directs with a sensitive eye and ear for the nuances and rhythms of Bridie's own quixotic style and those of the other writers, such as Graham Greene, whom Bridie has such sardonic enjoyment  in guying.  Anna Yates' traverse stage design evokes the dilapidated, humble schoolmaster's dwelling, with the scattered tomes of Scots' writer Thomas Carlyle amonst others.

This is a 1950s' zeitgeist yet self-deprecating play. Bridie was a founder of the Edinburgh Festival and the Citizens Theatre, as well as the proponent of a Scottish bourgeois theatrical movement which included middle class amateur dramatic companies. 

However another competing movement was more rooted in working-class socialist and cooperative, as well as both communist and apolitical, drama groups, especially in the large industrial heartlands. It seems to us political and professional tensions, which also ended Bridie's association with the Scottish National Players, run  through this play.

The Judge (Drew Paterson, an actor who has emerged from community theatre), guided by the  Procurator (Ross Dunsmore) is as much a representative of the commnity here, given a position of authority yet ready to be swayed  rather than a neutral arbitrator.

This is probably as good a production as this defiant play can get, even if probably, for modern tastes, it  feels overlong. Yet Mr Gillie also points the way towards Edinburgh novelist Muriel Spark's more famous Miss Jean Brodie.   

It's also a play which manages to give a definition of community with a resonance in our Facebook age,  Bridie's works seem to us well-worth reviving. Of the radical conservative school, including plenty of wry satire in his plays, he comes to no easy conclusions and it's a amber/green light. 

Review Wish To Die Singing - Voices From The Armenian Genocide

I Wish To Die Singing - Voices From The Armenian Genocide

by Neil McPherson 

Breaking The Eggs

http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

The slaughter of up to one and a half million Armenians in Easter 1915 within the rapidly-diminishing  Ottoman Empire hit the headlines at the time worldwide. One hundred years later Neil McPherson’s purposeful and necessarily partisan documentary drama piece, I Wish To Die Singing, charts the arrests; torture; mass killings; looting; rapes; slavery; forced conversions; death marches; desert concentration camps and an uncertain world response which remains to this day. 

Narrator (Jilly Bond) introduces an intense 90-minutes without interval, the spine of which are the lives of three different Armenians, survivors, part of an ancient Christian trading merchant minority in a Muslim country.

Music and dance accompany as a girl on the cusp of womanhood  (Tamar Karabetyan) steps forward to speak of relatives in America, along with  the painted Easter egg customs: “Whoever breaks the other person’s eggs wins”.

The joyful little girl (Siu-see Hung) from a wealthy merchant family revels in her dress from Paris and the country boy (Bevan Celestine) expects one day to inherit the family farm. 

Directed by Tommo Fowler, the seven-strong ethnically-mixed, colour blind cast, also including Simon Yadoo and Kate Binchy, give the stories a universal appeal, reinforced by sparsely-scattered references to other historical slaughters. 

The actors play multiple roles feeding in information to the audience from designer Phil Lindley’s  plain rough-hewn gray stage.  Backdrop projections (lighting and video: Rob Mills) include the Anatolian hills, sentences in the Armenian language unravelling as the characters speak, graphics, quotes, the landscapes of tragedy,  as well as  photos of perpetrators and victims. 

Theatrically, the verbatim testimony of the victims are the strongest, most affecting part of the play. 

The old man who swears not to “colour” events  (an affecting performance by Tom Marshall) relates facts which have the power of searing poetry. A sudden wail of the wounded released into the air after their assailants leave at sunset. The rows of heads on one side, bodies on the other with the slits in the thighs into which the hands were neatly inserted “like pockets”. 

Noone denies killings took place, but the Turkish Government have always maintained they were part of a civil war and not a systematic destruction of the Armenian people (with the Assyrian Christians and Greeks also targeted).

As the world map and alliances shift yet again, this play positions itself as part of a centenary push to have the slaughter put into the legal category of genocide, a word created specifically referring to the mass killings of Armenians. Reminding TLT and her companion of a sentence in  Ulysses by James Joyce (a book directly linked with Greece’s independence from the Ottoman Empire): “I fear those big words ... which make us so unhappy”. 

The word genocide was coined at a particular juncture in history during World War II with its alliances and emnities. Many present-day countries did not even exist.  The play’s narrative strand gives a partial rundown of why most scholars accept the events as genocide. However, as a subject of international law,  politically and nationally, it remains a divided issue.

I Wish To Die Singing tackles a 100 year old issue still very much the currency of our global times. A TLT amber light.

Review Facts

Facts

by Arthur Milner

Finborough Theatre, SW10

Scripting the Cops

After disappearing off the celebrity scene, it takes guts to reappear, as Kerry Katona or Frank Sinatra can testify. ;) But TLT and her somewhat dusty steed (horsepower rather than horse meat!) decided to make a comeback for this intriguing Canadian play. A Jewish-Israeli (Michael Feast) and a Palestinian detective (Philip Arditti) meet in a tiled Israeli military unit, the latter arriving after negotiating checkpoints, to investigate an American archeologist’s murder on the West Bank. Outside their usual local comfort zones, the archeologist's nationality forces them to take national and world opinion into account. Growing above the Palestinian and Israeli impasse, in fact (geddit?!), the play turns into a much more tricksy and close-to-the-bone dissection of policing worldwide and military-dominated land. That is: the use (and abuse) of technology and a police mindset  rooted in literary and screenwriting stereotypes, software multiple choice, competing academic hypotheses and, yes, nationalistic ideology. Everything, save evidence-based investigations. In short, amid this all, what are the facts? Was this clear from the preview performance at The Finborough directed by Caitlin McLeod? One has to say, 'Only sporadically'. Maybe the fault lies in the  script, maybe in an uncertain production, or perhaps a bit of both. Eventually the Jewish militant settler suspect, a property manager and nimble offspring of a lawyer, joins the detectives for interrogation in a canny performance by Paul Rattray. However, it takes a very attuned ear to catch the hints undermining the stereotypes put forward - and they are just faint hints planted amid the red herrings in this piece. It could be this play, despite, or indeed because of, its arguments, needs a more Pinteresque approach to allow the audience to assimilate the ironies underlying the oft trundled-out and well-rehearsed formulas about crime scenarios and Israel/Palestine. Consideration rather than choler.  This discussion of policing and technology should seem vital in a week which has spotlighted local level South African police abuse, often hidden when not filmed, and British children turned into stock computer program figures within school report software for administrative convienience. Instead, if TLT has interpreted correctly why the play may seem schematic, the myths and formulas, instead of counterpointing, are allowed to outweigh the meaning. Of course TLT and friend may have got this totally wrong - something you're unlikely to hear any police officer admit nowadays unless instructed by a professional liability insurance company lawyer or an approved police software program ;) An amber light for a production tackling important issues which may still have the potential to become a must-see if it finds its feet during the run.