Review Hyem (Yem, Hjem, Home)

Peter Barker makes himself at home with a warm-hearted play marking the debut of a promising writer. 

Hyem (Yem, Hjem, Home)
by Philip Correia

Where The Heart Is
 https://theatre503.com/

On a run-down Northumberland estate, Sylv and husband Mick keep open house for s series of young misfits, alongside a dog and a python named after screen icons Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh.   
 
Hyem is a Geordie colloquialism for home, and home is a place where safety isn’t assured for children or adults, according to Philip Correia’s flawed but vastly enjoyable first play.

Surrounded by hostile neighbours, Sylv (Charlie Hardwick) from the North East and Mick (Patrick Driver), a committed far-left winger originally from down south, have welcomed a disparate collection of young outsiders. into their hyem.

First comes tattooed, rebellious Dean (Joe Blakemore), then teenage schoolgirls Laura (Aimee Kelly) and Shelley (Sarah Balfour) and now the teenage boy Dummey (Ryan Nolan).

Writer Correia, originally from Blyth and also an actor, has a sharp ear for dialogue, a nice line in   banter and comedy and creates an interestingly fraught situation as the new arrival causes resentment in the loose hierachy of the household.

He peoples the stage with some well-drawn characters and there are strong moments and scenes. Shelleyand Dummey have to grapple with the six-foot python escaping and Mick gives Dummey a driving lesson in some hilarious set pieces.

However the characters are often stronger than the plot. While it's 2003 with Brits and Americans poised to topple Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and a career in the military having taken away the couple's son, this all feels more like wallpaper than an integral part of the story.

There are moments when possible plots - a political cadet school, intimations about sexual grooming - present themselves but they are then dismissed.  The script does have a tendency to drift away and is structured more like a screenplay than a stage piece.

In spite of this, director Jonny Kelly draws excellent performances from all the cast with Nolan’s initially taciturn and round-shouldered Dummey as the innocent heart of the play.

Balfour’s energy as Shelley and Kelly’s innocent seductress Laura convey powerfully the urges of teenage life while also having half a foot in the more guileless world of childhood.

Designer Jasmine Swan has assembled an evocatively jumbled set. The front room has a cheap sofa and an even cheaper print painting of an idealized young girl complemented by a plethora of photos framed on the wall -- portraits of families, cars and memories.

Playwright Correia nevertheless veers towards televisual soap opera, especially in the final 20 minutes where a short series of shocks leaves each character at a climatically hysterical end to their arcs.

This strikes a jarring, contrived note in an amber light play which still shows Correia to be a playwright of enormous promise.

Review The Heresy of Love

The Heresy of Love

By Helen Edmundson

Sister Act

http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/whats-on/globe-theatre/the-heresy-of-love

What an intriguing premise – a portrait of a seventeenth century nun and not just any nun. Juana Ines de la Cruz (Naomi Frederick). A Super-nun! 

Renowned female scholar, poet and playwright in Mexico, then a colony of the Spanish Empire. Born into racial and hierarchical complexity, she was one of six illegitimate children from a Criolla (of mixed race ancestry) mother and two different Spanish soldier fathers.

Helen Edmundson’s 2012 play, The Heresy Of Love, inspired by a staging of Sister Juana’s Baroque comedy House of Desires eight years earlier,  first surfaced to great acclaim at the RSC’s smaller space, The Swan,  in a season alongside Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and David Edgar’s St James’s Bible anniversary play Written on the Heart.

Now directed by John Dove, it is part of Shakespeare’s Globe Justice and Mercy season.

So TLT, not having seen the earlier incarnation, emerged from her cloister with her scarlet carriage looking forward to a major historical drama centred on a phenomenally-gifted woman writer constrained by contradictory and shifting circumstances of Church, Court and Empire.

Despite only few undisputed facts of Sister Juana’s life, there is certainly enough there to provide a meaty dramatic discussion in the context of our twenty first, as well as seventeenth century, preoccupations. Except that for TLT and companion, that discussion never came.

Maybe it was swamped by the much larger proportions of The Globe's thrust stage with grilles at the back, extended into the audience, we fancy, in the shape of a cross (design: Michael Taylor). However the piece’s linear telling of Juana’s story, use of Baroque  play structure with some cod-Shakespearean devices, stayed firmly within the stereotype for us.

There were tantalizing lines and possible story lines. 

The need to earn a living from commissions. The relationship with other nuns equally imprisoned by their sex and class, manoeuvring their lives, wealth and intellects within the confines of “New Spain” politics and the dreaded Inquisition. 

The wife of a powerful patron still subjugated by the need to produce son and heir. The illegitimate babies. The scholar nun, still very much maintaining the caste system by owning a mulatto female slave, but licensed briefly to hold her salons of secular as well as religious learning within the convent. 

The secret courts and selective record keeping.

But all this seemed thrown away and much of the history recounted outside character. Sister Juana herself seemed curiously marginalised and muted with the weak and trapped Father Antonio (Patrick Driver)  and the true-history plotting of Bishop Santa Cruz (Anthony Howell) leaving the more conflicted imprint on the play. 

Juana’s battle for her career and finally her life against the Archbishop Aguiar y Sejas (Phil Whitchurch as sour as the lemon he held in his hand) is allowed to fizzle out. It seems heresy to say it but the male scheming from the very beginning of The Heresy Of Love pulls the play itself away from its female subject and gives it whatever dynamism and rhythm comes through.

This is a shame as the Golden Age Of Spanish drama during Sister Juana’s lifetime not only allowed her plays to be published and staged to great acclaim in Spain and its empire, but also permitted female actors to play female characters when boys still monopolised such roles in England. 

There are some more lively, if rather obvious, moments with Vicereine patroness (an elegant Ellie Piercy), slave confidante Juanita (rumbustious Sophia Nomvete) and Juana’s niece Angelica (a fetching Gwyneth Keyworth) plus a final visual design transformation of Juana in her downfall gives a hint of more depth and subtlety.

Maybe in a smaller space, or even on screen, the granting of leeway for women in theatre and cloister, the dramatic possibilities of interplay between the excesses of the Baroque form and censorship, the illegitimate babies and the fatal real-life theatricality of male dominated church and state could bring a much more intricately human and open ended reading of the same piece.

This play certainly opens up a subject which we knew nothing about but at the same time only just about scrapes through into an amber light. 

Still, writer Helen Edmundson appears to be on a roll with an upcoming play on Queen Anne at the RSC and an adaptation of Zola’s Therese Raquin for Keira Knightley on Broadway. 

In the meantime, for those interested, Sister Juana is championed by poet Octavio Paz in his 1982 biography, the subject of a couple of early twenty-first century plays by American-Mexican playwrights Estela Portillo and Karen Zacarias  and a 1990 biopic from filmmaker Maria Luisa Bemberg.