Review The March On Russia

Tim Gopsill is drawn into a delicate yet hard-hitting 1980s' drama where family bickering reveals a deeper malaise. 

The March On Russia 
by David Storey

A House Divided
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Marital strife is a staple element of drama, both in life and on the stage. In either milieux it can be light-hearted or deadly serious, poignant or embarrassing; it can make us laugh or cry.

In the late David Storey’s 1989 drama The March on Russia, he managed to cover pretty much the gamut in a play that is both surprising and heart-wrenching.

At first the Pasmore couple's bitter discourse makes you laugh with their obviously well-used little digs. Then the laughter becomes more nervous with embarrassment; you start to cringe and by the end you are aching with compassion for this decent, loving couple, wracked in a torture chamber of old age, isolation, claustrophobia and regret.

Ian Gelder's retired coal miner Mr Pasmore aggravates with his mock bowing and scraping at his wife’s supposed bossiness. Sue Wallace's Mrs Pasmore whines at his persistent failure to respect her house proud values.

This grim routine is disrupted by surprise guests on their 60th wedding anniversary. Their three middle-aged children, without telling each other, have all decided independently to visit  their Mum and Dad at the same time.

The occasion for this seemingly contrived, but ultimately satisfying, scenario is the old couple’s diamond wedding anniversary. 

David Storey was a master at drawing intense drama from everyday life. His reputation, revived at his death only six months ago, was made with a  gritty tough-guy drama, This Sporting Life, whereas the March on Russia is as gentle and subtle as you can get.

Yet contained within the countless opportunities for nostalgia, resentment and recriminations, the dialogue  becomes truly painful.

The Orange Tree's in-the-round stage space perfectly suits James Perkins' atmospheric set evoking the couple's Yorkshire bungalow. It maps out their home -  the sitting room with its fireplace, sofa, table and chair, the utilitarian rear kitchen with work top, fridge and sink. The invisible walls between rooms and people become solid and real for us. 

The longer the play goes on, the more frenetically the spaces are used. Yet in Alice Hamilton's sensitively directed production, after all the anguish, you feel the real affection beneath the surface tension.

It's a slow burner and all the more effective for it. The arrival of the siblings is restrained, not to say repressed, before it boils over in a pointless row over an anniversary gift, unleashing hitherto hidden depths of resentment.

Sarah Belcher is the discontented local politican daughter, Wendy, her tongue loosened by drink, speaking her mind. Connie Walker's more conciliatory housewife and mother, Eileen, and Colin Tierney's morose, workaholic academic son, living a life a world away from his working class roots, complete the homecoming.

The March On Russia, we learn, really happened. It's the stuff of a First World War anecdote often recounted by the elderly Pasmore, an eye-opening episode in the otherwise routine life of a working man. It's the only outside subject the couple have to talk about but also a resonant reflection of failed ventures and thwarted lives. 

 David Storey's portrayal of the wounded heart of a family speaks eloquently nearly 30 years after its first production at the National Theatre and more than matches playwrights like Harold Pinter and John Osborne whose works are more frequently revived.

This is a welcome revival and director Hamilton and the fine cast gives it the nuanced green light production it deserves..

Review Jess and Joe Forever

Jess and Joe Forever

by Zoe Cooper

A Rural Gavotte

https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Once TLT lived in a one-horse village (the horse belonged to someone else). There was a pub, a few residential roads, the overgrown tracks  of disused ralway lines axed by the Beeching cuts and a bridge from which the  occasional de-nested fledgling used to fall which she tried to nurse back to health. 

You had to climb over several stiles through fields of sheep or cows - according to the season - to reach the next village. Here was the church, the post office cum shop and the primary school, so small two years were put together in one classroom (Old fogyishly she declares: "it never did us any harm!" ;))  So we felt amply qualified for Jess and Joe Forever, set in a Norfolk village.

Except of course in TLT's past house prices hardly moved,  credit was scarcely discussed and  banks were for the monthly salaries of parents (mostly fathers) or for businesses. Secondary schools were the big town secondary modern or the two single-sex public schools. The latter were kept afloat by fees which the armed forces paid outright for the children of the military and the local authority's payments for local kids like yours truly who passed the eleven plus. 

Joe is a scrawny motherless farmer's son, while Jess is a "townie" whose parents have a holiday home in the unnamed hamlet, a villa on Lake Garda and a live-in nanny for their plump, good-natured daughter.

In some ways, this is a play which touches on the new class system: the self-conscious Jess knowing but not quite understanding why she is better travelled, has an Eastern European nanny and why her boarding school is viewed as a superior sort of establishment.

  

Meanwhile Joe has a secret, revealed late in the hour long play which makes him less rash, more reserved and watchful than Jess who is a little girl eager to please and impress and a tad lonely. She is almost like some over-eager playwright or screenwriter, for even at nine (and three quarters), she knows the term "inciting incident".

Indeed it struck your apple-cheeked theatregoing duo that this little tale of class, nature, changing seasons, prejudice,  literature and economic downturns might work very well as a movie. Rooted in Norfolk, but surely equally at home in Florida or the deep south of America?

Like a lot of new writing nowadays, it has a slightly studied but pleasingly rhythmic script self-consciously threaded with Ovidian and novelistic references. Yet it also allows for charming, well-paced performances, as the protagonists awkwardly dance verbally around each other - Nicola Coughlan as blonde Jess and Rhys Isaac-Jones as dark and thoughtful Joe.

It's precisely paced by director Derek Bond on James Perkins' formal pastel grey, green and yellow chequer board set, heaped with untidy earth from the almost-opening scene as Joe digs cattle troughs interrupted by the curious, friendly Jess.

The scenes over the years are delineated by a rather self-conscious clicking of fingers and flash of lights. We are introduced into the geography of the village. At its centre the church with the lacuna, left by a vicar dealing with more than one parish, filled by those in the vilage who feel qualified to be lay preachers and provide the village's moral compass.

Meanwhile the children's lives seem to be mapped out by their education - Jess to a fee-paying boarding school, while Joe's position appears more nebulous. 

There is at least one glimpse of an above-average intelligence but a rather more puzzling reference to more mundane school affairs which makes him seem a unique pupil - the reasons for which are eventually revealed.

Jess and Joe Forever is a likeable jigsaw of a play with strong central performances. The writing could afford to relax a little, over intent sometimes on breaking the fourth wall. 

Nevertheless the sensitive production and the script's appealing grace attracts an amber/green light from your yeoman theatre reviewer TLT and her little automotive sidekick ploughing the theatrical furrows.

Review German Skerries

German Skerries

by Robert Holman

On The Rocks

www.orangetreetheatre.org.uk

It's often not what's said  but what's left unsaid in Alice Hamilton's cryptic but satisfying production of Robert Holman's 1970s' play German Skerries.

The play's title refers to  rocks in the middle of Teesmouth, Second World War crash site of a German Luftwaffe plane, which act as a geographical, historical and spiritual dividing point where past, present and future intersect.

On a grassy knoll a young worker Jack (George Evans)  from a local ICI plant and an elderly primary school teacher Martin (Howard Ward, the constable in Downton Abbey), curiously old-fashioned but shaping the lives of new generations, come together bonded by a common love of bird watching.

Yet other forces of the late twentieth century  are also bringing change,  risk and dangerous consequences with an impact on the lives of the two men, Jack's young wife Carol  (Katie Moore) and Michael (Henry Everett), ship's pilot and diver friend of the schoolteacher.

And in a sense the audience become twitchers, transported far from their homes to the windswept North Sea shores, to gain rare glimpses into the lives of others. 

First performed four years after the UK joined the EEC, originally the Coal and Steel Community, the new nationalized steelworks loom as large as the rocks.

Yet somewhere behind the cooling towers and fluting birds lies a hinterland of past and present art, as well as industry.  

There is something of  Philip Larkin's poem Church Going in the rhythm of the play, Martin's bike and cycle clips

The sounds of birds and tide merge like the tuning up of an orchestra in George Dennis's delicate but robust soundscape giving the piece a radiophonic feel. James Perkins' wood and gently sloping grass design and the lighting of Simon Gethin Thomas catch both time shifts and psychic space. 

German Skerries with its open ended televisual qualities also reminded TLT of the 1970s film Kes  and some contemporary TV plays

A green light for a  rough hewn yet fragile tapestry of a play with its almost heraldic cormorants and oystercatchers.

Review Eventide

Eventide
by Barney Norris

Tied Landlord

https://www.arcolatheatre.com/production/arcola/eventide

"It's like everyone's trying to keep a secret. Trouble is the secret's out."

Barney Norris's secretive lyrical three-hander, directed by Alice Hamilton at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston, covers a year bookended by a funeral and a marriage, revolving around a Hampshire village pub. 

Enter John the heavy-drinking freeholder pub landlord (an ebullient James Doherty) into the pub garden on his last day before selling up to a chain. 

The time of a village centred on the local Downton-Abbey big house, the Anglican church and local pub is now long past,  although, we learn by the play's end, charity at the point of delivery appears to have made a comeback.

Eventide means end of the day, but is also name of the tune and mentioned in the lyrics of hymn "Abide With Me". 

Delightfully, at least one more senior member of the audience sang along when it came up, testifying to the abiding influence of church services or, just as, if not more, likely, school assemblies.  The origin of the play's title appears to be one of the secrets of the play, part of a web of somewhat cryptic allusions.  

Yet Norris seemed to TLT to have caught the zeitgeist on the day employees at the Bank of England issued warnings full of foreboding about buy-to-let for a different kind of landlord.

Forced to liquidate to pay an ex-wife her half share of the assets, presumably after tax, as the couple's tax bill is also involved (we never see or hear of the accountant or bookkeeper who allowed this to happen!), Bible-quoting publican John entertains two final-day customers. 

Local lad Mark (Hasan Dixon) can hardly afford to pay the rent to live in his own village. He takes jobs where he can including, while mourning the death of his best friend, one to patch up the village war memorial with which her car collided.  While Liz (an excellent Ellie Piercy) drives a couple of hours a day to play the ramshackle church organ, taking a loss on her expenses.

Lucky mine host of this blog had a copy of the script/programme for this review. For TLT mistakenly thought she heard "always civil service when you come to The White Horse" as a clever pun on the old role of pubs in civil and criminal law, as even the Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery were part of a network of taverns where business was conducted and not part of (landlord) universities.

 

In fact, the line was  "always silver [my italics] service at the White Horse". Oh, the perils of doing reviews :o ;)!!!  

Yet set against a simple, but evocative of centuries of pub life, set design by James Perkins, the playwright  does investigate, dramatically, pub and English history in other ways.

The framework of monologues linked by sequences with two or three of the characters, is more apparent in the  somewhat self-consciously symbolic and poetic first half. Here ideas and arguments, although insightful, sometimes feel schematic and take over from characterisation, despite sterling work by the actors. 

And maybe some of the over-explanatory nooks and crannies over all the script could have been directed and played with a sharper, self-knowing irony rather than at face value. However, once the foundations have been laid, the play comes more into its own as it moves into the second act.

A year later, Mark, suited and booted, is an employee assistant manager of the pub, part of a chain, with a staff drawn from around the globe, preparing for his wedding. 

Liz is ready to play her last organist gig as Mark takes his bride up the aisle. 

John, previously sent off after describing the tribute to him from a communally-minded now deceased village elder, unexpectedly arrives and the threads of the play are drawn together.  

This  bookish, thought-provoking and sometimes charmingly mysterious piece has a definite appeal with a tour lined up after its Arcola run. Another amber/green light.