Review Years of Sunlight (Preview)

Years of Sunlight
by Michael McLean

The Likely Lads
https://theatre503.com/

One of TLT's relatives once  worked in Port Sunlight, a factory and a model village providing comfortable housing for its workers in Cheshire, near to Liverpool, built late in the 19th century. This parallelled similar Victorian projects such as Cadbury's Bournville and the much earlier New Lanark in Scotland.

In a sense, this part of the TLT clan was going backward in time. For before Port Sunlight, he and his new wife  had first moved into a maisonette near London in one of the many New Towns, part of a post Second World War attempt for a planned welfare state, set up not by a company but by national and local government.

So it was with her curiosity piqued, TLT parked her thespian jalopy at the Theatre503 for a preview performance of Years of Sunlight. This is set not in Port Sunlight,  but a post World War II overspill Lancashire new town for Liverpool workers, namely Skelmersdale.

The play charts the lives of friends over 30 years until 2010: Paul (Mark Rice-Oxley), the child of an Irish  single mother Hazel (Miranda Foster) conceived in Ireland, and artistically talented Emlyn (Bryan Dick).

Emlyn lives in a children's home before being fostered on the same estate where Hazel, who watches out for him, and Paul live. Both Paul and Emlyn are children, we learn eventually, of the New Town and both have a chance of upward mobility, skewed in various ways.

The play itself works its way backwards in time and, despite this structure, feels much like a soap opera. However  writer Michael McLean intelligently works in a more explicit entertainment and pre-Murdoch newspaper industry theme.

Paul's golf-playing printer stepfather Bob (memorable John Biggins), ultimately hobbled in a fate reflecting his earlier charitable activities, could equally have stepped out of as a boss in a 1950s' 'angry young man' novel or a Dickens' tale..

In addition, threaded alongside this, as far as we could tell, there is a subtle subtext drawing in the impact of arts'  funding  on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Seared Productions in association with the Theatre503 presents Years of Sunlight. The drama is directed skilfully by Amelia Sears with great clarity, aided by Polly Sullivan's deft, clever design. A granite pillar, a raised platform at an angle on the stage has cloud-like painterly daubs on either side. Video news projections reflect the changes over years, real-life and artistic fracturing.

This is a modest, rewarding play, a little schematic at times, but with plenty of potential - we did feel it might have another life on screen. The 75-minute, one-act drama has an outstanding performance by Bryan Dick as Emlyn with strong performances also from Mark Rice-Oxley and Miranda Foster.

At the same time, without wanting to give anything away, the new town theme did not always feel organically knitted in. So it lacked the final  lump-in-the-throat poignancy and feel of lost promise for which it was clearly striving in the preview we saw.

At its best Years of Sunlight reflects in its story the sly ambivalence found in contemporary narration of genuine 1960s' Skelmersdale Development Corporation film footage, shown in the play, promoting the brave new world. It's an  amber/green light for a tale of good intentions and sad outcomes.

Review Hobson's Choice

Hobson's Choice

By Harold Brighouse

Free Willie

http://www.nimaxtheatres.com/vaudeville-theatre/hobsons_choice

It's off to Salford via the Vaudeville Theatre on London's Strand for the Theatre Royal Bath's production of Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice, first produced in 1915 in New York. 

Yes, this product of the Manchester School of playwrights seems to be a global play at home around the world with its pompous merchants and rags-to-riches tale. Indeed in 1965 Sir Laurence Olivier took an Old Vic National Theatre production of Hobson's Choice to Moscow.

In 1880s' Lancashire, family patriach, master shoe and bootmaker and heavy-drinking freemason Henry Horatio Hobson (Martin Shaw) keeps his three dependent daughters, Maggie (Naomi Frederick), Alice (Florence Hall) and Vickey (Gabrielle Dempsey), as, well now we would say, unpaid interns in his successful shoemaking and retail concern.

And open the flap down to the basement, you'll find, like some Morlock of HG Wells, the timid, illiterate, low paid but talented craftsman Willie Mossop (Bryan Dick) originally an Oliver Twist-like "workhouse brat" apprenticed to Hobson.

Maggie, bookkeeper and saleswoman (unpaid), having reached the ripe old age of 30 (!!!) is "on the shelf", or so widower Hobson insists, knowing she is the brains behind his business. 

Meanwhile Hobson's refusal to provide dowries for Alice and Vickey stops them from marrying their beaux, solicitor Albert Prosser (Joe Bannister) and corn merchant's son Freddie Beenstock (Ryan Saunders) respectively.  

Whether by chance or otherwise, a wealthy female customer Mrs Hepworth (Joanna McCallum), similarly encumbered with daughters, sets off a chain of events where Maggie seizes her chance, takes Willie in hand and engineers a transfer of power which also allows her sisters to marry.

At the same time, Hobson's former status as head of his own shoe empire does not prevent the possibility of him sharing the fate of the destitute widow in Brighouse's earlier short play Lonesome Like   

As we noted in Horniman's Choice, it's a mistake to underestimate the sly sophisticated playwriterly skill, disguised under a stage Lanacastrian accent, of Brighouse, a Guardian newspaper reviewer and textile trader,

By coincidence, in fact, TLT and her jalopy settled down with the popcorn recently and watched Joy, a rags-to-riches merchandising tale which, amongst other similarities, even has a widow - Isabelle Rossellini - putting up the capital for a product and a father - Robert De Niro - whose factory benefits from his daughter's - played by Jennifer Lawrence - bookkeeping.

Instead of elements of music hall, it takes on the tropes of TV soaps alongside a change in the balance of power in a household and the themes of wage slaves,  legal chicanery and its own Hobson's Choice.

So this is an enduring comedy as much a Chekhovian and Pygmalion tale as King Lear with a salty Salford twist wherre everyone knows each other's business on Chapel Street. Hobson tries to hang on to his business alone beyond his term, without taking on the requisite son-in-law to take over his business and by doing so unwittingly gives more power to his daughters.

Yet this particular production of Hobson's Choice, directed by Jonathan Church,  overall needs a harder edge, although the central trio of Martin Shaw's Hobson with his Biblical rhythms of speech, Naomi Frederick's Maggie and even Bryan Dick's Mossop all acquit themselves with a steely core when called for with the necessary, almost Darwinian, ruthlessness.

No wonder, John Braine, we realised, took the title of his 1957 novel about a  go-getter climbing the greasy corporate pole from a line in this play.

Produced for the first time on Broadway two years before the USA entered the First World War, at the heart of the play remains a Dickensian mystery - who exactly is Willie Mossop to have been given these chances? 

In spite of his lowly status, he is also the object of attention from his landlady and her daughter (a finely judged cameo by Emily Johnstone) until he is grabbed by the ear, literally and metaphorically, by Maggie.

This production has its highlights, not least a detailed set by Simon Higlett which uses the revolve to magnificent effect to enhance the psychic space of the play in the second act. 

Nevertheless, there are times when it does drag between the moments of reversal, as if by wanting to reach the dots, some of the lines in between are neglected. Still, it's a legitimate interpretation and a solid production of a classic play and so a TLT amber light.