Review Mrs Orwell

Mrs Orwell
by Tony Cox

Gentlemen's Relish
http://www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk/

Post-Second World War. In the Soviet Union citizens were used to everything being in short supply and whispered about the corruption of those in authority who got more than their fair share plus access to foreign goods.

In Britain, paper rationing had just ended in 1949 but other rationing continued. The writer known as George Orwell had become the author of a bestseller Animal Farm, having eventually hit a post war Cold War zeitgeist, and then 1984, a sensation in the western publishing world.

The bio-drama Mrs Orwell begins with the male writer and essayist rather than the eponymous second wife, Sonia Brownell.

She is a 31 year old, glamorous blonde, as luminous and perky as a sunflower and the efficient literary magazine assistant editor to which Orwell was a contributor

Mrs Orwell, as the title and name implies (although George Orwell was a pseudonym), is for good or ill defined by George Orwell.

Orwell of course was a pseudonym (or  "mask" as one character remarks) for novels and especially essays which caught the imagination of a post-war generation - the persona of a plain speaking Englishman with socialist tendencies espousing values of decency.

This play by Tony Cox rather cleverly but far too subtly, in the opinion of TLT, seems to be a dream of Sonia as conjured up by George Orwell (né Eric Blair) and the male gaze.

Cox is light touch on Sonia who was the writer's second wife, marrying him in his hospital bed three months before his sudden death from a haemorrhage, who hasn't always had a good press.

It is also believed, the author partly based the character of Julia in his most famous novel 1984, although the play decides not to explicitly mention this.

Instead  Cressida Bonas has the difficult task on stage of embodying Sonia Brownell through the filter of Julia - becoming a creature of the famous writer's imagination addled by illness prescription drugs and eventually also a Scotch haze. 

In this Bonas, suitably svelte and cut-glass, does exceptionally well, as far as it goes, in spite of it being a tough ask.

But there is a vacuum at the centre of the play. In this, by coincidence, it rather resembles the fictional matriarch of Apologia where a reputation precedes a woman with hardly any supporting evidence..

Nevertheless in the case of the play Mrs Orwell and real-life perceptions of Sonia as a stereotype grasping and unstable widow in charge of the literary estate after her husband's death, this isn't necessarily wholly a criticism.

The personality of the excitable Orwell (or should we say Blair) is far more filled out  matched by a beguiling performance from Peter Hamilton Dyer who embodies the public schoolboy enthusiasm, including a taste for comfort food such as dumplings and Gentleman's Relish, which turns interestingly into something more hard-edged in the second act.

Rose Ede as the nurse has to cope with a stereotyped role but still manages to give a glimpse of underlying scepticism about the various visitors filing in to see the celebrity writer whose work Hollywood was by this time clamouring to put on screen.

She also shares a moment with the writer's new wife where the audience can glimpse the generous, practical side of Sonia's nature.

Publisher Fred Warburg is portrayed by playwright Cox and played by Robert Stocks as a stolid, methodical businessman balancing the interests of Orwell and keeping some secrets for Sonia yet excluding her from the male club.

This part of the play doesn't always add up  (and is somewhat at variance with the real Westminster School, Oxford-educated, First World War army officer publisher) but may again be explained by the prism of Orwell's imagination. Even so, he is given a clunky expositional speech in the second act which rather breaks up the fluidity of the production.

Edmund Digby Jones gives a charismatic if creepy performance as artist Lucian Freud. Yet he's introduced to us first with Orwell which again rather skews the audience's view of Sonia's close relationship with him. We never get to know that she had known Freud from her days as an artist's model.

So Sonia remains an enigma with her radiant photogenic film star good looks. No mention is made of her shared heritage with Eric Blair, both born in colonial India before returning to England. Or her schooldays with future film star Vivian Leigh, although it may explain an otherwise cryptic desire specifically referenced at the end of the play.

Mrs Orwell is neatly directed by Jimmy Walters keeping up the momentum with Jeremy Walmsley's music bridging the scenes. There's a deceptively simple and effective hospital room design by  Rebecca Brower. Nevertheless the corridor windows also transform themselves almost into cinema screens for some of the action.

However there are a few elements which marr the theatrical experience, chiefly the assumption that an audience new to the story will be able to pick up on the name dropping. By the same token, it may be  a play that has been thinned down and some necessary information left out.

Whatever, lack of background sometimes leaves holes in an otherwise skilful  patchwork and out-of-context jusxtapositions do undermine a more complex dramatic and humanly credible analysis.

It needs a little more like the piquant moment when Sonia is dragged by her husband, his publisher and Lucian Freud, who sees the opportunity for a loan, into a business arrangement and when we realise just how vulnerable and how potentially dangerous the situation is for her. An amber/green light.

Review The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus

The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus
by Tony Harrison

Mind The Gaps
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

In a world where the collection of data has become inextricably linked with cultural dominance, Tony Harrison's 1988 funny yet ambiguous The Trackers Of Oxyrhnchus has a welome revival at the Finborough Theatre in a cut-down production directed by Jimmy Walters.

To our untutored classical ear, this verse play, written shortly before the end of the Cold War by Tony Harrison, cannily mixes the archaic and the contemporary, the allure of Tutankhamun-like archeological digs with the then in-the-news music and recording industry's exploitation of young musicians.

All within the framework of the lewd and bawdy satyric play with the potential for tragedy, an almost-lost theatrical form which accompanied the ritual tragedies and comedies of ancient Greece.

This strange but compelling piece is itself  divided into three fragments. An imperial 1907 archeological expedition with two dons seeking to export in crates their papyrus finds to an Oxford University collection.  A 5th century BC mythological age of Greek gods and cloven-hoofed phallicly well-endowed, part goat, part horse, part human, satyrs. And then current-day London, via National Service, the South Bank's 1951 Festival of Britain and the 1970s' National Theatre.

The two obsessed dons, Bernard Grenfell (Tom Purbeck) and Arthur Hunt (Richard Glaves) are supervising a phalanx of Egyptian workers uncovering ancient scraps on a rubbish heap.

Disappointingly for the intense Grenfell, legal petitions from disenfranchised citizens outnumber slivers of literature including a long-lost satyr play of Sophocles - every legible word matched by an equal number of illegible phrases and huge gaps in the papyrii.

Grenfell's mental state proves to be the gateway to a past mythological world where Apollo possesses the don's mind demanding the mortal puts together the lost play without any gaps where the meglomaniac Greek god is both main character and superstar actor.

Apollo also demands total control over the arts maintaining an artistic class system which excludes satyrs from creating or playing.

Nevertheless the call to excavate the long-lost play also acccompanies Apollo depending on the satyrs, lured by a reward of gold and freedom, to find his lost herd of cattle. Indeed, the herd only proves to be another gateway to the production and reproduction of music unlicensed by Apollo.

Harrison is a Leeds Grammar schoolboy who read classics, not at Oxbridge, but at his local redbrick university. The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus takes a niche piece of historical and literary excavation, tracking its wider implications.

He takes as his starting point a reality - the expedition of Grenfell and Hunt using Grenfell's historically recorded real-life mental illness to lead us finally into a world where the past, the contemporary and the mythological uneasily co-exist together.

The leader of the satyrs (Richard Glaves transformed from Hunt) brings the audience through a Good Old Days Leeds Variety type singalong. Except the audience is instructed in a smattering of Greek to sing along to as a charm to raise the  boozy, lusty satyrs. They burst out from the confines of the crated papyrii on which Sophocles wrote his satyr to erupt into a spirited proletarian clog dance choreographed by Amy Lawrence.

It's certainly a very male play, a hold broken only by the fragile yet self sufficient nymph Kyllene (Peta Cornish) bringing a statuesque female dignity, a Victorian view of nymphs, contrasting with the rumbustious satyrs as they seek Apollo's lost animals.

Mixing classical stanzas, what snobby bloggers (!!!) might call popular culture, a kind of Dr Seuss frivolously serious didacticism, the dramatic conflicts over translation and artistic creation widen and darkens into the failure of idealism, increasing suppression and censorship.

Walters' energetic direction safeguards the lively pace and comedy but also clearly delineates a grevious uncertain, repressive status quo.

Designer Phil Lindley's tattered papyrii hangings, stone slabs and one dimensional pillars ingeniously evoke the Egyptian excavation and transform into a mythological backdrop before the archeological layers are completed by projections of modern London on the backcloths.

The costumes by Alexander William Connatty are equally unfussy and effective. Last, but not least, the lighting of Tara Marricdale takes on a central communal status and tellingly obscures as the ideal retreats into more violent consequences. 

And somehow Harrison's fidelity to multiple sources, the orginal history and texts, yoked together with a fluent train of thought rather than cut and paste as they emerge into the modern world,  insures a resonance in our current digital environment. Director Walters has only to make the lightest of updates - mobile phones, capable of filming violent acts, and isolating earphones instead of boomboxes - to keep the play pertinent.

For  we live in an age where artistic creation is now subsumed into and consumed as "content". The most popular, easy-to-reach websites often dominate with one sole interpretation of events and  control of such data, whether collected by companies or the state, raises the possibility of abusive monopoly commercial exploitation.

The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus still feels seriously relevant. Even the unwieldy title seems to anticipate our cookie-tracked digital age and it's a green light for this intriguing, humorous yet troubling play. 

Review A Subject Of Scandal And Concern

A Subject of Scandal and Concern

by John Osborne

Our Daily Bread

www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk 

Nearly twenty years before an English jury found a magazine editor guilty of blasphemy and almost fifty years before the abolition of blasphemy as an offence, John Osborne wrote a TV screenplay, A Subject of Scandal and Concern directed by Tony Richardson for the BBC Sunday Night Play in 1960, first produced for the stage in Notthingham two years later.  

Osborne had looked at contemporary documents on the case of socialist lecturer George Holyoake (Jamie Muscato), the last person jailed in 1842 for blasphemy in England and, from them, fashioned this play. This is no The Crucible, but deliberately so. It is a carefully measured series of snapshot scenes  from days leading up and during the trial and imprisonment of  Holyoake.

As presented in the play, Holyoake is a self-educated man, carefully spoken but a stammerer, who was somewhat uneasily linked with reformer Robert Owen. He is poorly renumerated for his pains giving lectures travelling from parish to parish. His starving wife (Caroline Moroney) and child, like many others caught up in the upheaval of the industrial revolution, are on the poverty line and have to lodge with her sister.

Holyoake doggedly pursues his lecture schedule including a talk in Cheltenham on  "Home Colonization, Emigration and the Poor Law" where he is ambushed by a question on man's  duty to God from the audience, a ready-made story for the local press, although Holyoake, an atheist, is reluctant to touch on any matter related to religion.

This is a sweetly-short hour-long play intelligently and fluently directed by Jimmy Walters with an equally ingeniously simple set of wooden benches and stone walls from designer Philip Lindley matching the fluid staging and scene changes (choreographer Ste Clough). 

Osborne's script also manages to allay possible accusations of a chattering classes' play on a working-class story by a careful structure with a modern-day lawyer narrator (Doron Davidson)  giving "information" and by the end, a touch of  irony.

It sent this journeyman critic, and car companion, as well to Google to look up Holyoake who turned out to be more esconced in the rivalries of  newspapers and political reform than the bare dramatic facts of the play want to state.

In the play we see a dramatically satisfying  predicament of a man who can find no way out but to answer with logic and coherence. A man who discovers himself abandoned to magistrate (Richard Shanks) and jury, with local newspaper printer and journalist in tow,  determined to maintain the power of the church and parish.

It is also curiously satisfying to complete the jigsaw with our own research, the main pieces already put in place by the play. Something which, even before geeks at the Rand Corporation began experimenting with the internet, was maybe the aim of the playwright. 

For, incredible as it seems ;), people at the time the play was written and broadcast used buildings where they could borrow books including reference tomes, some still not available on the internet but still to be found in print form in libraries, if the books and buildings have not been sold off.  

Interestingly, the late film critic Philip French also pointed out that in the 1960s stammering became fashionable in plays as a sign of integrity versus silver tongued liars and fraudsters.  So  documentary plays and protagonists with speech impediments were part of a general trend.  

But as has been noted on our blog several times, the playwriting world itself was still subject to the Lord Chamberlain's edict. And the welfare state (as Elvis Costello noted in the lyrics of Let Him Dangle) did not extend to abolition of the death penalty. So this combination of canny popularism, political activism and the ability to pique our curiosity makes for a fulfilling hour.

In an age where our state institutions are increasingly fragmented seemingly on a local basis, many would say creating a commercial maze with a loss of  accountability, the deceptively straightforward and artful structure of this play encapsulates a tangle of still relevant issues Even perhaps a ready-made historical subject for Ken Loach? A green light for a short play with a long reach.