Enlightenment at Hampstead Theatre

Edward Hall begins his first season as Artistic Director at Hampstead Theatre with a new play by Shelagh Stephenson, a writer whose career was shaped by the theatre (her early play The Memory of Water was staged there in the 1990s).

Lia and Nick’s 20-year-old son, Adam, has disappeared while on his gap year. They suspect he may have been caught up in a terrorist attack in Indonesia but can’t be sure. They have been left in an awful limbo; not knowing whether he is alive or dead they are unable to grieve, unable to continue living - Lia has even taken to consulting psychics in her need for answers, for closure.


Meanwhile Joanna, a young film maker, is very keen to televise their story, but while she professes an affinity with Lia - for, as she keeps reminding them, she's "a mother myself" - it’s clear her own career comes first.

Stephenson’s play is – to a point – compelling, the twisty plot keeps the audience guessing and it has a real narrative tug. But the writing is also chilly and clunky and often implausible. Lia spends an awful lot of time dissecting her predicament, to the extent that it clouds out her grief – her words are just words, unanchored to anything resembling real emotion.

There’s an uncertainty of tone to Edward Hall’s production. The early scenes not only suffer from an excess of exposition but they also have an awkward comic edge to them, a whiff of sitcom, especially those featuring Polly Kemp’s perky medium. Fortunately things shift at the play’s midway point and a welcome darkness sets in with the arrival of a mysterious young man into the family home. So significant is this change in gear that it almost feels as if the play could jettison its opening scenes to no ill effect.

The production, when it finally hits its stride, is well-paced and the plot holds the attention but Hall can’t quite disguise the stiffness of some of the writing nor the frequent lapses in credibility. When Paul Freeman, as Lia’s gruff MP father, blusters in at the end and starts behaving bluntly but sensibly it just highlights how frustratingly everyone else has been acting before then.

In a play that touches on the connectedness of things there’s a failure of all the various elements to intermesh. Lia’s many digressions, on chaos theory, the impossibility of trying to protect one’s children from the awful randomness of the world and the human capacity for goodness, seem superfluous to the story being told; one can hear the voice of the writer bleeding through. In amongst this Stephenson occasionally touches on something potent and true, like Lia’s quietly expressed anxiety that if she goes to the cinema with Nick she might enjoy herself, may even laugh, but these moments of emotional complexity are too few and far between.

Francis O’Connor’s sleek, curved white set is very striking, as is the use of projections on the ceilings and walls to create different locations, a park, and most effectively, an airport, but these potentially haunting and evocative visuals don’t quite click with the action on stage; again there’s a failure to completely mesh.

The cast do a decent enough job with the material. Julie Graham just about copes with a role that, though central, feels strangely half-formed and incomplete. Richard Clothier fares slightly better as her husband, Nick, though there’s a chilly impotence to his character too; he has little to do but bristle. It’s Tim Weston-Jones who really stands out, playing this young mixed up interloper with a suitable blend of brightness and menace; the scenes that he’s in are increasingly tense and provide the atmospheric kick the production is crying out for.

A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Rose

My mother hasn’t featured on this blog for a while, simply because I haven’t been able to persuade her to come to the theatre with me in some months. The idea of traipsing into London on a cold night just to see a play is not her idea of fun; preferring as she does a kind of semi-hibernation in winter months involving lots of Cabernet Sauvignon and selected DVD box sets (she is quite taken with Mad Men).

Though she gets a kind of stricken look on her face every time I so much as pick up a copy of Time Out or the Guardian Guide in her presence, last week she, without prompting, mentioned that she might quite maybe want to see that thing with the Scottish chap in it (that Scottish chap being Ken Stott, we eventually established after further discussion and not James McAvoy). Her enthusiasm trailed off a bit when she realised I was serious about arranging tickets but I was not going to let such an opportunity pass.

The Rose in Kingston is the nearest theatre to where she lived and they happened to be playing host to Ed Hall’s all male theatre company Propeller who were doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in tandem with The Merchant of Venice. The former seemed like a fair comprise. My mother was less sure, having not enjoyed the last few Shakespeares I subjected her to, but I mentioned that there was a large bar and I absolutely, definitely would not make her sit on the floor as I sometimes do at the Rose (the cheapest tickets, the best views and even at home I usually opt for the floorboards over the sofa anyway – so it works for me). There was an unspoken agreement that pre-show drinks were on me.

The production is broadly performed and entertaining, a bit laboured in places but good fun. It’s an all male company and the performers playing female roles do little to signify femininity except for putting on skirts and speaking in a higher tone of voice: the actors all sport close cropped hair and stubbled chins. There’s some neat playing about with gender roles: when squabbling in the forest, Hermia and Helena square up like football fans in a pub brawl while Demetrious and Lysander scrap like schoolgirls in a playground. Puck wears stripy tights, a tutu and a pair of glittery ruby slippers. But other than that it’s a pretty straightforward run through, not quite as bawdy and well-paced as the Globe’s recent production. My mother looked a little perplexed at times but I think she may just have been working out the logistics of nipping downstairs for an interval cigarette.

At the end her verdict was: “OK”, “quite funny in places” and “not as long as I thought it would be.” All of which is more positive than I expected. She couldn’t quite fathom why the woman next to us was “laughing like she wanted everyone to notice she was laughing,” but this is an improvement on the time she spent much of a (admittedly fairly pedestrian) production of As You Like It glaring at the large man who was taking up more than his fair share of the bench they were sharing and scribbling notes throughout – who turned out to be Peter Hall.

She has tentatively agreed to come and see something else with me in a couple of weeks provided it's not another Shakespeare, though she says she must first “check the work diary” which I think is a euphemism for seeing if she can’t find something better to do, but still – I’ll take that as a yes.