Review The Roundabout

The Roundabout

By JB Priestley

A Day In The Country

http://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Watching the rare revival of this 1931 play, a naughty thought crossed the mind of TLT. What if JB Priestlley, Oscar Wilde  (from beyond the grave), Bernard Shaw and Kaufman and Hart,  the latter probably by wire across the Atlantic, had got together and decided to write a piece for the stage as if one playwright and as a game of consequences?

For that's exactly what the plot and dialogue felt for us in this drawing room comedy, written originally for actress Peggy Ashcroft during a short-lived love affair with Priestley. Ashcroft passed on it and a subsequent production was mounted in Liverpool.

It's a strange, uneven script, given a solid production directed by Hugh Ross at Finsbury Park's Park Theatre, with an oddly mechanically zingy aphoristic feel, where the characters are vastly stronger than the plot. 

Aristocrat and financier Lord Kettlewell (Brian Protheroe), although maintaining a substantial country house household, is insolvent and trying to reduce costs by discarding his mistress Hilda Lancicort (Carol Starks).

In the midst of his travails, he is ambushed by the arrival of his long-lost daughter Pamela (Bessie Carter), from whom, along with her mother Rose (Lisa Bowerman), he has been estranged for many years. 

Pamela has arrived after a trip to the Soviet Union, bringing with her fellow communist Staggles (Steven Blakeley) whose tough ideological stance disguises a rather more illegitimate appreciation of capitalist wine and women. 

An appreciation which oversteps the mark when he presses his unwanted attentions on the pretty maidservant Alice (Annie Jackson), behaving more like a licentious eighteenth century nobleman than then adherent of an austere cause  bringing equality to the masses.

The frailest of plots has a set simply but effectively indicating a Tudor-style mansion with overarching beams (designer:Polly Sullivan). But couched somewhere beneath it all is an a subtext dwelling on shifts in power - from painting and theatre to the mechanised medium of film, from silent movies to sound, the failure of the Soviet ideal, international politics alongside economic woes.  

All entangled as Parsons the butler (Derek Hutchinson), who has his own run of good luck cruelly snatched away, drunkenly observes, "in a shtate of gre-aet social confusion".

Nevertheless there's an oddly self conscious feel to the shifts as well in style and tone in the writing. While jolie laide Pamela pushes the plot along, the mournfully humorous leftover of imperial Edwardian Britain, down-at-heel idler Churton Saunders (Hugo Sachs) is like a silent movie character with a clear view but bypassed by events, but still tolerated on a small stipend on the studio lot. 

Meantime the inpecunious widowed Lady Knightsbridge (Richenda Carey) shows an imperiously focussed saleswoman manner in drumming up business for her family with her own take on political events: "Communists, eh? Is there any money in it, because I'm looking for something for Agatha's younger girl - dreadfully plain, poor thing!".

Maybe the play was caught halfway between theatre and cinema and its own push between agitprop and entertainment. 

Comrade Staggles, a character in Blakeley's performance still with a decidedly modern if caricatural feel in our times, ostensibly talks about the bloated capitalist classes when we know Lord Kettlewell is on his uppers. 

But Staggles could just as well to be talking about the fake life of luxury portrayed on the big screen, "this rich, artificial sort of life, where you're eating and drinking all day, and all the women are parading their sexual charms." 

So, a bit of a curio in the Priestley canon in a production which sometimes still has to find its rhythm but with strong enough characterisations and performances to carry it through to the upper ranges of an amber light.

Not A Review - Sunday Readings In The Park

Sunday Readings In The Park

www.parktheatre.co.uk

Box office: 020 7870 6876

Tickets £10

Catch two rarely-staged plays, part of The New Actors Company's Sunday Readings In The Park, in script-in-hand performances followed by a Q&A session with the cast and director taking questions from the auidence.

Sunday 17 July, 2pm:  

Laburnum Grove  

by JB Priestley

Directed by Robert Laycock

George Redfern is a respectable and reliable man. Everyone thinks so. He is a family man and lives in the quiet suburban Laburnam Grove where, his daughter complains, nothing ever happens. One evening  his daughter’s soon-to-be fiancé, and his brother in law intend to borrow money from the seemly affluent George, that is, until George calmly explains where his money comes from and he might just be a criminal mastermind.

Sunday 24 July 2pm:  

Burnt Piano 

by Justin Fleming

Directed by Robert Laycock

Never performed in the UK, Burnt Piano by Australian playwright Justin Fleming is the touching story of Karen; born under the star of Waiting for Godot. She attempts to make sense of tragic events in her life by tracking down the one man on earth she believes can help her: the aged Irish playwright Samuel Beckett now living in Paris.

Review I've Been Here Before

I've Been Here Before
by J B Priestley

For The Children
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/show/i-have-been-here-before/

A famous searingly prescient newspaper cartoon of 1919 by Will Dyson shows statesmen leaving the Versailles Peace Conference after the First World War turning towards a naked infant weeping behind a pillar, by the child the peace treaty discarded on the floor. Above the innocent toddler reads a sign. "1940 Class".

This came to mind watching J B Priestley's I've Been Here Before. In 1937 when this play was first performed (with performances still needing the permission of the Lord Chamberlain) people had been there before.

And indeed the time travelling play is an impassioned plea, in retrospect in vain, to intervene and take control of destiny before it was too late.

Director Anthony Biggs orchestrates a crisp, carefully-thought-out production at the bijou Jermyn Street Theatre.

The fuel driving this play is the anguish over attempts to mitigate  the era's wars, economic woes and subsequent unspeakable cruelties with academic theory and expediency. Far from adhering slavishly to a theory of predestination, in the play's final act there is a fervent appeal to break away from the predicted unhappy endings. 

Set in hostelry, The Black Bull, on the Yorkshire Moors, a German refugee, a former science professor (Edward Halsted), without the international prestige of an Einstein,  at first finds no room at the inn.

However ambushed by cancellations over the Whitsun weekend, the landlord (Keith Parry) and his widowed daughter (Vicky Binns), already lodging the headmaster (lantern-jawed Daniel Souter) of a recently founded school for bright local boys,  find themselves taking in not only the Professor but  a local businessman (David Schaal), a school benefactor,  and his young wife (Alexandra Dowling).

At the time refugees could even be deported back to continental Europe from Britain. Fascist regimes were taking over Spain and Italy and the National Socialists consolidating in Germany.

This raised trade and stock exchange issues with new partnerships and alliances construed in the play as a love affair and elopement, suicide and intervention also taking on double meanings.

And the landlord's grandson with a scholarship to the boarding school could be said to be of the 1940 class. Mention of experimentation, starvation and drug testing are more explicit.

Firmly anchored in its time, I've Been Here Before is given an admirably straightfoward production with precise, clearly defined performances from the whole cast.

This precision is also reflected in the ingeniously simple but effective design by Cherry Truluck and Alberta Jones.

The pale blue stage is curved like half of a planetary ring, with several audience seats in the middle.The placing of the furniture into different positions after each of the two intervals completes the illusion of a revolving orbit and passing time. With blue, gray and lavender costuming, all in all, it's an elegant production.

Priestley was a playwright and political activist whose skill, using a fashionable theory of time as a vehicle, in bringing forward facts and conclusions otherwise unpalatable to British audiences and those in authority cannot be underestimated.

Despite its mystical overlay, it struck TLT as having someting in common with the events of Noël Coward's Still Life, the basis for the movie Brief Encouner,  or Terence Rattigan's later The Browning Version, couching seismic upheavals in a domestic framework.
 
I've Been Here Before is an intricate literary attempt to avert the fate laid out for the 1940 class. Yet it is still imbued with sadness and awareness of the political reality as a failing British Empire government wavered and blinded itself, falling back on an aristocratic parochial piecemeal parish structure. A green light.
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