Review Apologia

Apologia
by Alexi Kaye Campbell

The Last Supper
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/apologia/trafalgar-studios/

It's a luxurious country kitchen on the birthday of Kristin, an American-born divorced Marxist academic in her sixties. She's awaiting a fellow veteran of radical 1960s' politics and  her two sons, whom she hardly ever sees, with their partners for a celebration dinner

Peter who is in banking arrives punctually with his physiotherapist girlfriend Trudi while Simon, preceded by his TV actress wife, creeps in more surreptitiously.

Kristin was an activist during the anti-Vietnam war marches in Grosvenor Square and the Paris student demos of 1968. A bundle of hurt and recriminations soon emerges triggered by Kristin's just published memoirs, which she claims were written only to chart her professional life, where her two children fail to get a mention. 

This play was originally staged in 2009 on the intimate stage of the Bush Theatre before it moved to its present venue. It may be something is lost in a larger venue. There's nothing wrong with what is there, but this family drama feels frustratingly under-developed.

Frustrating especially because the juxtaposition of banking, evangelical Christianity, television fame, academia and the legacy of 1968 with the personal cost to a woman and her family is an attractive and thought-provoking premise. 

Nevertheless it remained for TLT  a play of five characters in search of a plot.  Jamie Lloyd directs a solid, straightforward production. There is a marvellously detailed widescreen set from Soutra Gilmour with just a glimpse of a corridor through an open door and a Renaissance portrait with a young woman's telling glance.

However while Stockard Channing is fine as blinkered old leftie and mother Kristin, she is a curiously passive character around whom the others circulate and comment.

Laura Carmichael as Christian evangelist Trudi shines brightest of the satellites with a naturalness in  turning often unforgiving lines into thoughtful responses in  this family drama.

Otherwise Joseph Milson doubles as Kristin's sons, Peter and brother Simon, both isolated in their own way by their parents' actions. Freeman Agyeman is the actress, increasingly estranged from Simon, who reveals her own motivations in life as well as art. Desmond Barrit makes the best of a stereotypical wisecracking gay best friend, a veteran also of the 1960s' protesting frontline.

Our googling reveals the term apologia - from the Greek - to be "A formal written defence of one's opinions or conduct", a rhetorical format not to be confused with apology as an expression of regret.

In some ways, TLT felt, this play tries to combine the two with the unrepentent activist having put forth in print a defence of what she calls her professional life and her sons yearning for something more from her - perhaps something less a defence and more an apologetic understanding of what has happened to all of them.

Yet the nitty gritty exploration is not there - the trial, just or unjust, a show trial or a genuine investigation - never comes. We're never quite sure about the nature of Kristin's past actions or her perceived fault in anything but the most general terms.

The characters are there, but the issues seem thinly drawn with digressions, even if we may suspect the play teeters on the verge of asking whether if she were a man and a father instead of a mother, the same reproaches would be there.

The potentially most interesting relationship is that between Kristin and her prospective American daughter-in-law Trudi, who doesn't pretend to be an intellectual and met Kristin's son Peter at a prayer meeting. However this is a drama which may have looked better on the drawing board than on stage. 

Practically each character has his or her own moment of "apologia" but, for us it felt stretched out and it's an amber light.

Review Harvey

Harvey
by Mary Chase
http://www.trh.co.uk

What's Up Doc?

The pastel coloured, chubby-cheeked winged cherubs of the rococo Theatre Royal ceiling, floating in their nappies around the rose chandelier, seemed to have an earth-bound twin as TLT and motorised companion watched Mary Chase’s American 1944 play "Harvey" from up in the gods. 

A chubby-cheeked cherubic James Dreyfus as amiable alcoholic but financially well-endowed Elwood P Dowd ambled on and it also struck us “Harvey” has all the elements of an eighteenth century sentimental comedy of manners.

Such plays often have the threat of the “family” (usually males) having the (usually female) beneficiary of family money detained. So bedlam may lurk beneath the shenanigans of wooing before eventual final act resolution. 

Except that eighteenth century plays such as She Stoops to Conquer or The Rivals don’t often, if ever, include a six-foot-plus, invisible, “pooka” rabbit, the eponymous Harvey, with or without knee breeches and tricorne hat.  

And Elwood remains resolutely set on the bachelor life, while still reading out loud Jane Austen’s famous Pride and Prejudice dictum,  “... a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Yet this Janus-faced play (and later movie), as has been noted, could equally well look forward towards Joe Orton’s high-octane 1960s’  carry-on  What The Butler Saw.

Elwood, to the shame of sibling Veta (Maureen Lipman) and niece Myrtle Mae (Ingrid Oliver), both eager to fit in with the town’s social elite (embodied in a brief but memorable performance by Amanda Boxer), not only fritters his life away in local bars but claims an invisible lanky bunny as his drinking companion. 

Veta and Myrtle Mae therefore seize the chance to take control of family finances aided by family attorney and town judge Omar Gaffney (Desmond Barrit).  The dream of selling up and moving away, leaving their relative, they fondly imagine, in the considerate hands of the psychiatrists at the local private asylum, seems within their grasp.  

But the best laid plans go awry. Callow young psychiatrist Lyman Sanderson (Jack Hawkins) is  let loose by negligent hands-off boss Dr Chumley (David Bamber) on town citizens.  Sanderson wrongly assumes the family seeks relief from its elderly female relative, Veta rather than the hallucinating Elwood. 

Veta  does eventually escape permanent incarceration. But only when lax Chumley, married to a blonde bombshell (Felicity Dean), while preferring  his women prone and silent, realises the possible consequences of illegal detention. The rest of the action revolves around the psychiatrists seeking to contain liability supported by  bewildered Duane, the heavy of an asylum orderly (a galumphingly charming Youssef Kerkour)  and compliant  young nurse  Ruth Kelly (Sally Scott). 

All of which, set down so plainly, makes the play seem a much darker comedy than it plays in Lindsay Posner’s gently sedate production, staged with an affectively detailed music box turntable of a set designed by Peter McKintosh. 

James Dreyfus, after a self conscious start, settles into his role and eventually convinces as the tippler allowed free licence in the town. Linal Haft gives a pleasing cameo as cab driver who acts as the 20^th century equivalent of the deus ex machina. Maureen Lipman and David Bamber as Elwood’s sister and chief psychiatrist respectively give polished performances but, like the whole production, are hampered by pedestrian pacing. 

The grim reality, compared to theatrical comedy, of such “private” parish detentions without trial must now be archaic tragedies in Britain  with medical records  the property of a boss accountable to all of us, the Secretary of State for Health 

Still, on the day we attended the trials and tribulations of Elwood P Dowd and his sister Veta, the family of a woman activist murdered in Afghanistan reportedly were told to claim by police she was mentally ill to avoid reprisals against them.  

It seems stories like Harvey still have the barbs to reflect current events, but the dark undercurrents are muffled in the stately pacing of this production.  So don’t sell your grandmother to buy a ticket, but there’s enough there to keep an audience watching, if not entirely engrossed, and wondering what a sharper production would reveal. An amber light.