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.
‘This is my play’s last scene; here heavens appoint
My pilgrimage’s last mile…’'
It takes Professor Vivian Bearing an uninterrupted hour and a half to complete her pilgrimage. There is nothing comfortable in having to watch someone die of cancer, play or no play: this is entertainment of the most rigorous variety. That we can take comfort from this simple, unfussy staging, is testament to the delicacy with which director Charles Rivington’s company have handled their source material.
Despite its prevailing theme, Wit is not a simple awareness piece; a pamphlet for cancer relief, a cry in the street for a legion of sufferers. It is an ambitious amalgamation of ideas, sometimes too sentimental, often laboured, but forever labouring towards resolution. What, after all, is death? It is merely a breath. But life is for the living – the words unsaid, the smiles concealed, the letters of love left undelivered, a truth untold amounting to the worst kind of lie; these are the most utterly punishing of life’s tragedies. John Donne, for whom the play’s central character reserves a zealous fascination, said it best; ‘No man is an island entire of itself’. Neither is any woman. The lessons learned by Bearing during her prolonged decline are universal. What worth the life lived without the warmth of human compassion and companionship?
Bearing, played with considerable courage and skill by Veronica Hare, is an English scholar working in America, an expert on Donne’s Holy Sonnets. Blessed, or cursed, with a towering mind, for fifty years she inhabits a rarefied tower of ivory, diligently toiling amongst the arid bones of academia, scourge of students and petty administrators. She manages to maintain her formidable, imperious poise when diagnosed, but her resolve begins to fade when entrusted into the care of maverick Drs. Harvey Kalekian (Henry Ward) and Jason Posner (Alistair Kerr). As her ovarian cancer (a terrible, unspoken irony for this loveless, childless woman) becomes malignant and threatens to overrun her body, she becomes something of a curious sideshow for her physicians, an objective study in the tolerance of pain. In her plight, Bearing is forced to reach out for kindness and consolation, approaching death, like Donne, ultimately unafraid of her fear.
The Barn was transformed into a realistic imitation of an isolation ward, the antiseptic colours and starkness of the empty spaces mirroring Bearing’s crisis of consciousness, and the inhumanity of untrammelled reason. The ensemble ably supported Hare’s lynchpin work, offering several accurate supporting turns. Kerr’s precocious Posner was a particular delight, a well-drawn caricature of scientific indifference. Also impressing was Barn debutante Laura Ward-Nokes as Dr. E. M. Ashford, Bearing’s blousy university tutor and intellectual mentor. There were slack points; the blocking was a little slip-shod at times, with too much dialogue being given in profile or pointedly upstage, away from our eyes and ears. It was also rather one-paced, when the fragmentary narrative should have lent the action a quick-quick-slow dynamic. I stand upon points, however. Overall, this was a solid success.
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