Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
Joe Hufton and Serena Manteghi’s staging of Simon Stephens’ Bluebird made for an occasion flushed with both sadness and joy.
For many involved this was indeed a kind of Dramasoc swansong but it also proved to be, for the less senior members of this excellent ensemble and production team, a defining watershed. Watching with intent, it was possible to discern how the best of adeparting generation were mixing it with the cream of the current crop to produce a little piece of theatre magic. My personal sadness at witnessing a host of the society’s leading lights bowing-out was surpassed by a more profound sorrow triggered by the show’s quietly unremitting emotional torque. Anybody honest enough to admit that they wept need not be ashamed, for the falling of tears betrayed nothing but finer sensibilities: this was a cracking effort, of immaculate conception and execution, and one of the best Barn evenings in recent memory.
Bluebird is the story of one night in the life of Jimmy, (Ed Duncan Smith) a London cabbie and former novelist whose life was turned upside-down by a terrible accident. Jimmy is a virtual down-an-out, who sleeps in his car under an archway in Hammersmith, having turned his back completely on his craft and the incidental life of normalcy he was privileged to enjoy with his estranged wife, Clare (Rachel Finnegan). For the first half of the play, we played witnesses to what passes for his brave new world, the ferrying of ‘fares’ (a succession of neurotics, narcotics and meandering lost souls) around the vast, heaving melting pot of the metropolis. After the interval we were the intimates to a remarkable reconciliation scene, with husband and wife finally reunited to face the torturous agony of their shared histories.
My only previous experience of Stephens’ work had been a revival of his Olivier-winning On the Shore of the Wide World at the Theatre Royal’s studio space in March. On that occasion I was, despite the willing work of the cast, left uninspired. The overall impression was of a playwright concealing something precious from the audience, without ever really convincing anyone of his hidden treasure’s worth.
Bluebird, by contrast, is a superior work, its structure more hermetic and its dialogue more direct. It does contain major plot flaws (without spoiling the coiled horror of the surprise that awaits the audience near the end, how on Earth is Jimmy not more jailbird than Bluebird?) but these are excusable in the overall context: this was a modern morality fable of bona fide incisiveness. The text plays out like a re-working of Homer’s Odyssey, with Act One serving to epitomise Jimmy’s years of wandering lost, and Act Two offering hope of the future as a kind of spiritual return to a figurative Ithaca; the boundless grace to found in the acceptance of a loved one. This was also a play very much of its place, an urban drama documenting the disparate horrors and delights of a life lived and endured in the Big Smoke. Jimmy’s struggle and eventual success in adapting to its harsh and discordant rhythms mirrors his marshalling of the self; a violent and cleansing catharsis and a triumph for wounded humanity.
Hufton’s vision for the Barn was ambitious and original; a street lamp, some paving stones and the half-gutted frame of a salvaged Volkswagen providing a neat and tidy impression of our pitiless jumble of a capital. This impression was enhanced by Jethro Compton’s mood-lighting and choice of soundtrack; the guttural wrench of Otis Redding’s voice has always reminded me of long, hot summer dog-days, and was a perfect accompaniment to Stephens’ words here. The entirety of the cast did themselves justice, but the two principals deserve especial praise. Ed Duncan Smith turned in a performance of near-infinite subtlety that, in spite of a few accent slips (our Jimmy is a Mancunian) was a pleasure to behold: the strength of his performance was measured in his stillness of gesture and efficiency of reaction that epitomised the character’s maudlin alienation. Rachel Finnegan once again demonstrated, with the intensity and common compassion of her down-to-earth Clare, an array of skills which make her one of a dozen practitioners of genuine quality that the society can ill afford to lose.
Lose them it must, however. I must repeat my forebodings of sadness and joy, but need not worry unduly. The future’s bright. The future’s Bluebird.
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