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.
Jonathan Kerridge-Phipps has created a darkly funny and polished show in ‘Old Times’. Staging it in the round at 41 Monkgate Theatre, the audience walks into a set in which the actors are already moving about in silence: lighting cigarettes, watching restlessly, seemingly waiting for something. This sets the mood for a classic Pinter drama: comedy, broken up with striking pauses and meaningful looks.
The set is simplistic and intimate; the use of a carpet as flooring makes you feel as though you are stepping directly into someone else’s home. The lack of an ornate set means that the actors cannot fiddle with props; as a result one gets the sense that every movement or gesture is deliberate and significant. The overall impression one gets from this production is that everything has been meticulously considered. No movement, facial expression or change in vocal tone is wasted.
Kerridge-Phipps has directed the play in such a way as to draw attention to every nuance of the text. What the audience receives is a detailed exploration of the subtext of each line. There is a myriad of different possibilities of meaning, making this an engaging play – the audience is forced to think constantly and try to make their own sense of the story.
The play is rich with innuendo that provides a lot of the humour, including the recounting of a tale of salacious usherettes outside a cinema. The underlying eroticism of the text is carefully balanced: the actors tread the line between outright vulgarity and a latent sexuality present in all characters, most particularly Anna (Georgia Bird). Bird’s protean acting style encapsulates perfectly the bright, energetic and fitful Anna, the character obsessed with the past and her halcyon youth spent in London with Kate. However, Bird failed to move beyond her character’s innate restlessness. Her gestures were small, fidgeting, and even in moments of great tension she did not alter her physicality into something stronger and more compelling.
Deeley (Sam Hinton) is a ball of energy on stage, captivating the audience’s attention with the merest hint of a derisive lip curl. His character shifts from ribald humour to a sudden cutting tone, allowing the audience to see something into the privacy of his life with his wife Kate (Serena Manteghi). Despite Deeley’s patronising and vaguely misogynistic tone directed towards her, Kate holds her own with a quiet stoicism and a long-suffering air (“Everyone’s married”, she says witheringly). Manteghi is an exceptional actress, possessing a calm force that invites the audience’s concentration. Her stillness makes the smallest of movements an outcry: an abrupt standing up to get a cigarette becomes the most profound retaliation to her husband’s diatribes.
The triangle between the characters becomes a war. Everything Deeley says is framed as an attack; Anna’s remarks are deliberately provocative. There is a scene where Deeley and Anna recount a song, but the singing becomes pointed and vicious as they vie for Kate’s attention. When Kate and Anna talk only to each other, they ignore Deeley completely. This is emphasised by the lighting (operated by Gareth Prescott), which excludes Deeley’s side of the stage, almost as though the audience is witnessing a memory of Kate and Anna’s old life together.
Kerridge-Phipps has tackled a difficult Pinter text with ease, giving due attention to the comedy of the lines and highlighting all of the different implications of the text without settling on any one meaning. The production was professional and thought provoking, but most of all, hugely entertaining.
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