Review Child Of The Divide

Catherine Kelly finds joy and sadness in a play facing up to a traumatic moment in India and Pakistan's history.

Child Of The Divide
by Sudha Bhuchar
based on the story of Bhisham Sahni

Born Of A Fragile Land
 https://polkatheatre.com/

Imagine yourself at five years old. Suddenly your parents are fleeing from your home as the country is split in two and a new border created. In the chaos your hand slips from your Dad's grasp and you find yourself alone.  

Child Of The Divide is a family-friendly, heart-rending, poetic tale focussing on little Pali lost during the chaos of forced migration in 1947 Partition when India was divided into majority Hindu India and majority Muslim Pakistan. 

Pali is saved, given a new identity, name, faith and  home by a kindly Muslim couple, only for his young life to be torn apart again when, years later, his birth father finds him. 

This is the story of individual, blameless citizens left to cope with the consequences of imperial retreat, a subject already amply dealt with in  productions such as Drawing The Line and movie The Viceroy House.

Child Of The Divide, adapted by Sudha Bhuchar from a story by Bhisham Sahni, was first produced eleven years ago and is now revived to mark 70 years since Partition.

Karan Gill gives a tender, eloquent central performance as the little boy in Jim Pope's quick moving production in Polk Theatre's comfortable, intimate space. 

A large map backdrop from designer Sue Mayes keeps the physical geography and the man-made red line of the new border between the two nations in constant view and  in the minds of the audience..

The versatile set turns into a variety of locations, whether a hectic train station, a mosque, a river or playground.  Carefully-chosen props - luggage, a bed frame, boxes, bags - evoke the meagre but vital possessions of the refugees. Peter Harrison's lighting with sound by Arun Ghosh set the tone with exquisite precision in each scene, drawing the audience into this topsy turvey world.

Devesh Kishore and Halima Hussain as Pali's adoptive father and birth mother respectively and doubling as two children also divided from their families manage to give clearly defined and poignant performances. However, it  is a complex story, with a seven year span, to fit on an intimate stage with a cast of five adults playing all characters on both sides of the divide and a wide age range. 

Alongside the fast-paced scenes, the doubling up can be challenging for audience trying to keep track and more use of  props and character traits might have helped.

There is some unevenness in the performances with more work needed on projection of dialogue and clarity of exposition. The audience were left sometimes straining just to enjoy the poetic language and understand the discussion of ideas in the play.

Nevertheless there's enough there to indicate the production and cast will resolve these issues once the production is bedded in during its two week run at the Polka and on the following  UK tour.

Otherwise this is a remarkable play bringing home  the experience of displaced millions through one small child.  One of its strongest aspects is in conveying the tug of love of the two mothers, one grieving for an incalculable loss and the other, childless, joyful at finding a longed-for son. whom she protects and cares for against all the odds.

Deep and heavy stuff, you may think, as a play intended audience for seven to 14 year olds. However, by not underestimating its young audience, Child Of The Divide takes on an added resonance for both adults and children.

Offsetting the darker issues and outer and inner conflicts, there are still plenty of lighter, fun scenes of children simply playing together, enjoying a rollicking good game. Stimulating and heartfelt, this courageous, life affirming play fully deserves an amber/green light. 

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 Footprints On The Moon

Footprints On The Moon
by Maureen Hunter

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

This deceptively gentle, warm hearted play has a savage undertow about small town life on the Canadian Prairies and also the treatment of women in life - and in fiction. Indeed, we would go as far as to say that Maureen Hunter shows an ear for dialogue and subtle plotting which reminds us of Tennessee Williams.

Joannie (Anne Adams) is an attractive, girlish 30 something single mom in an on-off relationship with denim clad vodka-swigging Dunc Carr (Derek Hagen) in an isolated township.

While others, including her sulky teenage daughter Carol-Ann (Sally Cheng) and ex husband Boone (Nicholas Goh) come and go, she remains a permanent fixture.  Like the landscape, she's not "going downhill, but plateaued".

While this 1988 Canadian drama is mostly eminently theatrical, there's an alluring pensive cinematic quality to the script laced with wistful humour. Designer Charlotte Henery cleverly transforms the set of the other play running this month at the Finborough into a train station and then the kitchen of Joannie's homestead.

We also get to know the layout of Rose Coulee through the dialogue  - neighbour Beryl's purple house, the Drake Hotel, the rough and tumble Plains Inn with scrawled graffiti on the wall of the men's toilet, Joannie's Dad living nearby, the store where Joannie works, Dunc and his medically ailing mother and even the long-term dent on the fender of Dunc's truck.

Director Anastasia Osei-Kuffour deftly paces the action in an intricate, slippery piece with an ebbing and flowing soundscape by Lucinda Mason Brown and delicate lighting by Peter Harrison.

Joannie slides almost imperceptibly from the reality of her life to odd time shifts, wish fulfilment and dream.This is emphasized by Joannie's rose coloured spectacles in a prizewinning essay voice over on her home town which feels like a throwback to more successful schooldays in an original dramatic structure which the audience finds itself absorbing as if by osmosis.

As the play progresses we get larger and larger glimpses of what her life may really be like, Carol-Ann's eagerness to get away to her father in Toronto, the trap for women from which Joannie's mother seems to have escaped and Dunc Carr's mother cannot - it is all filtered through othe sensibility of the characters.

With fine performances throughout, the play revolves around Adams's wounded yet feisty Joannie. The first act feels the strongest while the second struggles a little and maybe betrays that it's natural milieu is film.

Yet with its twists and turns, this is a distinctive and touching green light drama which plays on the psychology of the audience as much as revealing what lies beneath the characters and the rhythms of late twentieth century prairie life.  

Review Jam

A troubling school reunion gives reviewer Peter Barker plenty of food for thought on bread-and-butter school issues.  

Jam
by Matt Parvin

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

Matt Parvin’s impressive debut full length play Jam is an intense two-hander charting a sometimes funny, sometimes ugly classroom relationship which should have ended a decade before on school leaving day. 

Former pupil Kane McCarthy (Harry Potter's Harry Melling) unexpectedly and uninvited visits his former teacher Bella Soroush (Jasmine Hyde) in an English rural comprehensive.

He's now a bit of a drifter whose words can't be trusted. He turns up with a rucksack filled with schoolday relics, - plus a bottle of vodka and a baseball bat. All of which Bella goes through methodically, as if it's back to the rebellious student and the schoolmarm emptying his bag.

Kane admits he was a bit of a twat, aggressive and abusing Bella over her Iranian heritage. Nevertheless this seems like a diversion from the deeper reason why Bella is just not acceptable to Kane and he is marked by his schooldays. 

For the past is not another country in Parvin's play - they don't do things differently there. The present repeats the past. These two are locked, however unwillingly, in a toxic relationship.
 
And the cryptic title Jam? It's not clarified in the play but Parvin's past work includes an adaptation of Alice In Wonderland during his own student days may give a clue.

Lewis Carroll's  White Queen pronounces, "The rule is, jam to-morrow, jam yesterday - but never jam to-day.", later coopted by economist John Maynard Keynes and various politicians of all hues.
 
Melling is immensely credible as West Country misfit Kane who is just not that clever. His explosions of rage are visceral, if sometimes with a little too much volume for such a small performance space.

The presence of Hyde's Bella pays dividends later on in the play when her frailties and flaws are exposed.

Her self-control and her controlling personality are brought into context as the script and Hyde's performance reveal the rawness of her emotions and her capability for violence.

An ingenious scaffold climbing frame design from Emma Bailey splits the performing space in two cleverly suggesting a room and a playground.  Alexandra Faye Braithwaite's soundscape subtly
mingles the murmurs of an outside world with the obligatory ringing of school bells.

Playwright Parvin and director Tommo Fowler, could afforded to cut at least quarter of an hour from the running time of 95 minutes, tightening the script and ratcheting up the tension.

Even so, the writer proves adept at building and then releasing tension. Yet Jam has a conclusion that is anything but a release of suspense but a surprising and skilful collapse into exhaustion. It's a green light for a thought-provoking classroom drama.