Review Punts

Punts
by Sarah Page

Virgin Care
https://theatre503.com/

Any right-thinking parent worries about the future for his or her kid, especially in these competitive times when even human beings seem to be turned into assets and liabities in the accounts' ledger of life.

Punts is a comedy drama dealing with physical and financial health, parenthood, kids, marriage - and sex. Lots of sex but not perhaps as you would expect.

Antonia and Alastair, a housewife and her barrister husband, live a seemingly well-to-do existence  in England's capital with their one remaining child, 20-something Jack, while the other two sons have fled the nest.

Jack is sporty and affectionate - but he also has learning difficulties, seemingly from medical negligence at birth, which puts him behind his peers. His working life comprises of a couple of days a week in his father's legal chambers doing menial work shredding paperwork.   

So what does a housewife and her barrister husband do to insure the future of their son? Maybe help him invent an app so that he becomes a new tech millionaire? Set up some savvy investments with presumably the compensation award obtained from a hospital trust?

In this case, determined to give their son every chance in life and fit in with his friends and brothers, his mother rather eccentrically but in a way understandably, decides to give Jack an enjoyable, but paid for, first sexual experience in his own bedroom.

Punts is filled with good ideas with a terrific cast, even if it veers somewhat uneasily between real life issues and a satire on both middle class private life and global commerce.

Christopher Adams gives a beautifully nuanced and wholly convincing performance as the hesitant but also confidently literal lad trying to become his own person.

The behaviour of aggressively loving mother, Antonia - Clare Lawrence-Moody - and his apparently more diffident bespectacled father Alastair - Graham O'Mara - stretches the bounds of plausibility, with the uneasiness of the mixed genres  becoming more blatant. However the characters themselves have a succinct, if unsympathetic, credibility.

Florence Roberts is the cut-glass blonde and beautiful invited intruder into the household, eventually bruised by her encounter with the family, who has something in common with barrister Alastair - charging hefty fees.

Jessica Edwards' direction is also clear and succinct over the eight scenes of this one-act play. Set in the affluent West London home, Amelia Jane Hankin's spare set ingeniously combines the feel of a luxury home transforming it with a single piece of moveable wooden furniture into a kitchen and a more clinical sauna-like atmosphere.

The script and some of the design also seem to be self-consciously playing with book, stage, transatlantic film and TV references. We can see this making a very distinctive and quirky movie with plenty of touching humour.

However we're in two minds about the play - it has a lot going for it, especially with the resolute and sympathetic Jack. Yet the insertion of real life problems, obviously derived from research, feels rather awkward while the out-and-out satire works much better and provides the most lively moments.

At the same time, Punts is clever and sassy with an underlying seriousness, deserving of an amber/green light.

Review Horniman's Choice

Horniman's Choice

Four Plays by Harold Brighouse, Allan Monkhouse and Stanley Houghton

Spinning A Yarn

http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/2015/hornimans-choice.php

TLT and her motor sped along to the Finborough Theatre in South West London, turned into a corner of Lancashire. A small-scale repertory company presents four one-act plays from the Manchester School of playwrights  written between the Russian Revolution and the middle of the First World War.

Horniman's Choice is named for Annie Horniman, a scion of the Quaker tea merchant family and pioneer of British regional rep with her groundbreaking Gaiety Theatre. 

Founded in 1908 and inspired by a German model - industrial Manchester seemed a sympathetic environment with its flourishing German community - the theatre's focus was on local new writing as well as encompassing Ibsen, Shaw, Euripides and Shakespeare. 

It toured both in Britain, with a West London base, and North America but achieved international repute with its Manchester-based plays.

And it's the theatrical Lancashire idiom which immediately grabs attention in the first play, The Price Of Coal by Harold Brighouse, later of Hobson's Choice fame. Written in 1909, this piece combines a conscious move towards working class and enconomic "realism"  but includes elements of the supernatural and  a music hall sensibility.

Anna Marsland directs  the plays with precision and sensitivity within a versatile tabernacle-shaped set furnished simply by designer Amelia Jane Hankin, serving as coal miner's family home, a Red Cross hospital room, a chapelgoer's living room and  a weaver's cottage.  

All the playwrights are linked by the British Empire cotton trade,  Manchester Guardian journalism and their association with Annie Horniman.  In addition, in an area where the Cooperative Society has its roots, they also catered for the tastes of an audience of politically idealistic young factory workers with weekly wage packets and a thirst for current affairs.  

In The Price of Coal, at crack of dawn, collier Jack Tyldsley (Lewis Maiella) pleads his case as would-be husband to cousin Mary Bradshaw (Hannah Edwards), before setting off for his shift, his offer to wed teasingly unanswered. 

Amost immediately, with lighting by Rob Mills ratcheting up the tension, the tragedy of a colliery accident, inevitable both in theatre and real life,  overshadows  the course of the day.

Yet The Price Of Coal is also a marriage proposal comedy with two housewives, Jack's mother Ellen (Ursula Mohan) and neighbour Polly Livesey (Jemma Churchill), mining disaster veterans, educating a relative newcomer of  "foreign" extraction about mining life. That is to say, "foreign" meaning a weaver's daughter from outside the village.  

This juxtaposition of melodrama, underpinned by documentary working class reality, comedy and a wry theatricality establishes the intriguing almost Chekhovian tone of the evening translated into Lancastrian.

It continues seamlessly with Allan Monkhouse's Nightwatches, jumping forward in time to a First World War Red Cross hospital. An authoritarian nurse (Churchill again) leaves a nervous, educated but sentimental new hospital orderly (James Holmes) in  his quarters on the night shift.

Almost immediately he's drawn into another war: Between voluble aggressive private (Graham O'Mara) and a deaf and dumb shell shock victim (Maiella). 

With an almost absurdist quality, this is arguably the most complex and most flawed piece. Nonetheless, bringing up "pretendin'" and "shamming", it not only deals with judgement and perception of shellshock, but also the nature of theatre, through its clearly defined characters and plot twists.  

  

Struggles continue with the equally absorbing latter two plays: The Old Testament And The New by Stanley Houghton, (celebrated for the better-known Hindle Wakes)  where the head of the household and chapel bookkeeper (Holmes) retreats into biblical dictatorship, when only a monetary arrangement remains after family events spiral out of his control. 

  

The final play is Lonesome Like, again by Harold Brighouse (the only writer, it seems, who remains in copyright)  set in 1911, the year of the National Insurance Act. 

It centres on a disabled widow (Mohan), forced into the workhouse, hoping for a last-minute reprieve from the parson as she packs up her widow's weeds and Elizabeth Gaskell-like mop caps with the help of a young female factory worker (Edwards).

 

Nevertheless, in scenes threaded with social and literary references, and filled with humour, she finds a saviour from an unexpected quarter.

Along with a carefully modulated sprinkling of music and other sound effects by Simon Gethin Thomas, these populist yet sophisticated pieces receive full justice in this production with skilful and warm performances by all the cast. A green light from TLT for an intricate weave of melodrama, humour and self-knowingness.