"The Colour of Poppies" and "Greed"
Reviewed by George Hummer

Some nights you want the show to go on forever, or until you are genuinely worn out by delight, when you find an overload of good theatre such as happened this week at The Theatre Chipping Norton. First there was Faith Brook, a big star of yesteryear and an actress of beauty, charm and conviction, in The Colour of Poppies. Then there was the Clod Ensemble, an offshoot of Theatre Complicite, in Greed, as fine a demonstration of theatrical skills as you would find if you searched throughout the country for them. The audiences for both were respectable in terms of numbers, enthusiastic in response in a way that Chippy audiences only seldom are. The feast was there, and the partakers were lucky and delighted and richly rewarded.

Faith Brook gave us a study in the erotic awakening of a woman of 75 years, Marthe, a widow with children and grandchildren, as Monsieur des Cravattes first flirted with her, then claimed her heart. The premise is unlikely, to young people possibly grotesque. The truth being awakened for us was that Passion, the capital letter is intended, is not the preserve of the young. She was a woman titillated, then interested, then swept into a love affair that she, like many of the rest of us, would imagine beyond the emotions of a woman of her age. What is it that Hamlet says, that his mother should be immune to the hectic in the blood? No way! In her best bourgeois manner, Marthe agrees she should be immune, but she is not. Emphatically not. Amazement more than self-awareness is her response. The elderly nerves betrayed in her arms and hands become erotic twinings of limb and sinew. Her ludicrous posing on a table, recalling the (apparently nude) pose that she struck for her artist lover, bears not a hint of embarrassment at the figure she must strike. She is convinced by love. It comes from, once again, passion, and that has become for her the force of life. It is a study in what should strike us as ludicrous, according to the attitudes with which we are surrounded, but is an affirmation of the force of life to a woman who opens herself to the love that has come to her. Will Marthe go with Mr des Cravattes to Seville, wearing clothes the colour of life, poppies, excitement, love? Of course she will. Like Molly Bloom, she said ‘Yes!’ And the people in the audience, primarily women, jumped for shared joy.

As for Greed, the very name evokes D.W. Griffith, grainy black and white film, overcooked emotion in a silly story, melodrama writ large. Out they come from behind the screen, two characters in search of a narrative, comically embedded in an unlikely story. There are no words except those flashed up on a screen behind the actors. The miming is exaggerated, brutally comic. Then the swift passage of emotions over the faces and gestures of the actors strikes at truth, like human emotions hidden in a tabloid story. Quickly the mime acquires a sinister reality that goes well beyond gesture and facial contortion, and arrives at an affecting narrative. Out of what might be easily dismissed artifice, those who emerge are two people in their real dilemmas who deserve sympathy. It shouldn’t happen, but it does. It is theatrical magic of the most blatant sort, and like the fiction of Beryl Bainbridge, how it is achieved is incredible. Ensemble is the right word for this company, because clearly it is a company effort. The lighting design and plot, the split-second pickup of light and sound and acting cues, the beautiful piano score played equally beautifully, the simple but really rather lavish costuming -- everyone who has been involved is the equal in importance to the two unquestionably brilliant actors. If prizes have to be given, they must go to Sarah Cameron and Marcello Magni in the two acting roles, quicksilver personified, and the amazing piano player, John Paul Gandy. But we haven’t seen theatre like this since Complicite played here several years ago, and the production showed us just what we have been missing.

So, two nights of unmitigated delight in The Theatre. Aside from being diverted, what happened to us in the audience to reward us for attending? Insight, an exercise in using emotions usually left unflexed, a delight in rediscovering what a good night’s drama can do to the cultural receptors. And the conviction that we were among discriminating and consenting adults enjoying some rare, valuable experiences in re-connecting with what life is about.

It beats the hell out of Eastenders.

 

A THIRD ACE AT THE THEATRE
A review of "Closer" by George Hummer
 

Closer by Patrick Marber, which played for one performance in Chipping Norton on 9 June, was the third Ace in The Theatre’s June programme, along with The Colour of Poppies and Greed. By far the most complex drama of the three, by turns comedy, tragedy and psychodrama, Closer is an intimate study in the spaces, sometimes the gulfs, that defy intimacy in our age.

Anna (a slick Amanda Osborne) is a photographer, hence the title of the play, who specialises in portraits of anonymous people caught unawares. Her favourite place to catch these specimens is the aquarium. On a professional assignment she photographs obituary writer Dan (the excellent Ben Nathan), who has by chance rescued a stripper/waif named Alice (the brilliant Josie Taylor), who intrigues a dermatologist named Larry (a sexually predatory Kevin Drury). The four begin a complex set of affairs, break-ups, crises, call them anything but scenes, that are the playwright’s box of tricks. He does the dramatic equivalent of photographing the four at key moments in their relationships, keeping himself anonymous and stealing their identities, exhibiting them for voyeurs (us, the audience) and then snapping shut his apparatus to close off involvement. The fourth wall of the stage, the invisible one that closes off the actors from the audience, is in one of his comparisons a mirror to the actor and a silent, secure means for us to observe what is none of our business. The emotion is raw, the language is filthy, the souls laid bare are stripped, sometimes comically, beyond modesty. It is a gem of a play, though it could be shortened, and the four young actors explore and exploit their roles like guests at a feast.In keeping with the theme, the set consists of nothing but a small number of geometrical boxes, that are by turns chairs, tables, beds, exhibition rostra, placed in a black box. The lighting is also simple, or seems so until you realise that every action has taken place in the classic still photography setup, key light, fill light and spotlight. The clothes are many and well designed, each scene being defined, as if in a still photograph, by what the actors are wearing. Assured without being slick, the action is directed to move from tableau to tableau, with the one exception, Dan’s physical attack on Alice, coming as a shock.

As the play progresses, it is clear that it will be Alice who breaks out of this box. Vulnerable, a willing sex object in her work as a stripper, a girl who is whatever anyone hires her to be, she proves to have no identity. She reclaims the negatives of her by-now-famous photograph from Anna, and disappears. Was it her devils that killed her, or was it only a taxi? We won’t know, because that is outside the frame of the photograph.

Closer than a close-up, fascinating, repellent – remarkable theatre, impeccably presented.