The Stepmother, Orange Tree Theatre

Githa Sowerby’s The Stepmother was given a one-off performance in 1924 but has not been seen on a London stage since then. Now the Orange Tree has done what they do best, unearthing the play on one of their regular rummages through the archives and giving it a solid, engaging if slightly stately and stodgy staging.

Sowerby’s best known play, Rutherford and Son, is frequently revived (Northern Broadsides are touring it at the moment) and anthologised, but despite being relatively unknown, The Stepmother reveals itself to be just as interesting a piece of work, full of feminist fury at the way a woman’s fate - and her fortune – can be so easily buffeted about by the whims of men.

Lois, orphaned and alone in the world, has been working as the paid companion to a wealthy spinster; now, following the death of her employer, she stands to inherit a considerable sum. But the dead woman’s grasping brother Eustace Gaydon has no intention of seeing his late sister’s money slide out of his grabby, grubby grasp.

After a rather padded prologue set in 1911, which establishes Lois’ predicament, the play leaps forwards in time by ten years to the 1920s where we discover that Eustace has solved his financial problems by marrying the unfortunate girl. The adult Lois is now a successful business woman, managing her own dressmaking company while also acting as a mother figure to his two young daughters, but despite her evident business acumen, it’s her husband who signs the cheques and has final say in how her money is spent. Sowerby’s anger at this state of affairs pulses through the play - her feckless artist father having squandered both his own fortune as well as his wife’s – and it’s this fire that gives her writing its potency,

The figure of the stepmother, so often maligned - an upsetter of nests and a terroriser of children - is here made engagingly sympathetic. Lois is little more than a child herself when she is made to take the place of a dead wife and mother (one suspects she was given little in the way of a choice in the matter) and the bond between Lois and Eustace’s older daughter Monica is delicately drawn; not dissimilar in age their relationship is one of friendship and empathy at the other’s plight, rare and refreshing in its harmony. When Eustace is at his most badly behaved and caddish, it is to Lois the daughters turn.

There are echoes of Jane Eyre here, but this is a Rochester driven only by self-interest and his own financial mismanagement. Eustace, played by Christopher Ravenscroft - normally such an avuncular Sam Waterstone-y presence - is a proper hissable villain, the kind of man who scoffs “what’s a woman’s word in business?” as he – literally – trousers his wife’s savings. The performances on the whole are as solid and reliable as they usually are at the Orange Tree, all very well-pitched for the intimate space, with Katie McGuinness conveying a suitable mixture of smarts and vulnerability as Lois and Jennifer Higham agreeably wide-eyed and kind-hearted as Monica.

Sowerby’s writing is intriguingly shaded, particularly in regards to the character of Lois, who is far from a one-dimensional victim; her eventual journey into the arms of a lover is also depicted with a refreshing amount of sympathy, an escape route from an intolerable situation - though it’s telling that he also tinkers with her finances behind her back.

Sam Walters’ production is – as ever at this venue – of a certain degree of polish and intelligence, investing the play with tension and a degree of humour too, but its power is diluted somewhat by issues of pacing; the numerous fiddly scene changes - dominated by the interminable shifting of chairs and unfurling of rugs - allow rather too much of Sowerby’s anger to evaporate.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Sabbat at the Orange Tree Theatre

During the ‘witch craze’ of the Jacobean period and the years that followed only a comparatively small number of people were put to death in Britain (in Europe they were altogether quicker to take a torch to those they suspected of dabbling). This is why the trial and subsequent execution of the Pendle witches has left such a long-lasting psychological mark on the region – it was an aberration.

It was also one of the best documented of all the witch trials thanks to the efforts of Thomas Potts and his The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. The bulk of the accused lived in the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire; they were drawn from two families: both sprawling, poor, marginal and headed by an ageing matriarch, a source of fear and upset to their better off neighbours. Bad blood between the two families may have fuelled the waves of accusations; the key witness, Jennet, was a girl of only nine who was pressed to give evidence against members of her family.

Richard Shannon’s 2008 play has been revived by The Dukes, Lancaster, to mark the 400th anniversary of the trials. Drawing on Potts for inspiration, Shannon simplifies what was a complex and messy affair, focussing on just four characters: Richard Howell, the Justice of the Peace for Pendle; his young wife Judith; the simple and easily swayed Jennet; and Alice Nutter, who stood out among the accused as a widow of means and covert keeper of the Catholic faith. Shannon imagines a situation in which Howell’s (fictionalised) wife becomes friendly with Nutter during her ill-fated pregnancy, and how – following the baby’s still birth - grief and suspicion blinker an essentially decent man when the accusations start to fly.

Robert Calvert’s magistrate is an intriguing figure to begin with, authoritarian and unshakeable, but kindly; this shading is lost as Howell comes to stand in for the law, becoming increasingly reactionary and aggressive in his actions and utterly unwilling to listen to reason. Christine Mackie’s Alice is intelligent and independent of spirit, a little too unblemished to begin with, but the slow erosion of her hope following her arrest is poignant to watch. Nisa Cole has the trickiest task, playing Jennet as a girl who is lost in her own head but not without a capacity for self-preservation; her Jennet half-believes the things she is saying, that she does indeed possess dark powers.

Amy Leach’s production trots out a number of Witch Play tropes. As well as being a Catholic, Nutter is also a healer and midwife with a bag full of cordials and charms. But while there is much talk of incubi and familiars, of teet-suckling and the devil’s mark, Shannon grounds the play in more human terms.

Miriam Nabarro’s in-the-round set with its edging of sawdust is simple but evocative and while the quartet of dangling meat-hooks suggest something Saw-like may be in the offing they’re effectively used to represent the four walls of the dungeon at Lancaster Castle in which the accused were held as well as, finally and poignantly, the gallows. Where Shannon’s play succeeds most is in conveying the ease with which such a flame could take hold, the malignancy of whispers, and a willingness to scapegoat the socially undesirable that still strikes a chord.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Next Time I'll Sing To You at the Orange Tree Theatre

The stage is naked except for a small raised platform and a deflated air mattress. The ceiling glitters with fibre optic stars. Beneath these, a group of characters debate the nature of existence and reality, using theatre and the nature of performance as a broader metaphor for life (and death). Their conversation, which is studded with intentionally bad jokes and poetic digressions, swings back and forth but never settles.

First performed in 1962, James Saunders’ play was inspired by the story of the hermit of Great Canfield, a man who spent over three decades living in almost total isolation in a tiny hut. Was he some kind of contemporary saint or was he just a lonely old man prompted to reject the world after the young girl with whom he was fixated rejected him?

The play was the first ever directed by the Orange Tree’s Artistic Director, Sam Walters, and Saunders went on to have a strong association with the theatre throughout his life. Saunders’ next big project, according to the programme, was a stage adaptation of Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Italian Girl, which seems apt as there is a lot of thematic overlap – but Murdoch usually embedded her philosophical exploring within a stronger structure than Saunders uses here.

The piece constantly comments on itself, picking itself apart. The performers remark on how they are going through the same motions, night after night, and on how nothing much has actually happened yet. “Yes, we get the metaphor,” is the weary reply. The director takes on the mantel of creator, the ultimate auteur, while the performers are deemed to be somnambulistic figures, neither fully awake nor asleep, with the exception of one man who eventually starts to merge with the figure of the hermit. There’s plenty of Pirandello here; Beckett and Ionesco too. You can almost see the spines lining Saunders’ library. Though frequently witty and undeniably smart, the play at times feels like a collection of his interests and obsessions, a primer in existential thinking, rather than anything more cohesive and relatable.

The cast cope well with the particular tone and rhythm of the play. Brendan Patricks is elegantly arrogant as Dust while Aiden Gillet succeeds in bringing out the spiritual quality of his director figure, Rudge. Roger Parkins’ character Meff, there primarily to provide relatively light relief, has dated far less well though he does his best with what he’s been given, and Holly Elmes, as Lizzie (one half of a pair of interchangeable identical twins), is required to do little beyond look almost permanently bewildered.

Unfortunately along with all this 1960s intellectual enquiry, the play comes with a hefty dose of 1960s chauvinism, complete with jokes about rape. Anthony Clark’s production attempts to counteract this by turning it into a period piece, complete with corduroy trousers and snug black turtlenecks, an ashtray quickly filling with the remnants of skinny cigarettes. But by rooting it so firmly in time, the light that shines around the edges of the text is dulled. The play becomes a fixed, rigid thing rather than something questing and illuminating. It’s easy to see what excited people about this play and how it came to influence other writers. At times it is still possible to feel the electricity of ideas at work, but in framing this as a heritage piece Clark has neutralised the play in more ways than one.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Mary Broome at the Orange Tree Theatre

What’s in a name? An awful lot, a life, a past: to have a name is to exist, to be recognised. Mary Broome has worked as a housemaid for the prosperous Timbrell family for years, yet they only have cause to learn her surname when it transpires, on the eve of a family wedding, that their younger son Leonard has got her ‘in trouble.’ Suddenly they’re forced to see her as a person rather than as part of the furniture, a speck in their peripheral vision. Later the family congratulate themselves on letting another housemaid hang on to her ‘awful’ given name of Beryl rather than insisting she change it to something more palatable.

It says much about both playwright and play that Allan Monkhouse chose to use her name as his title. Monkhouse, a critic and literary editor for the Manchester Guardian as well as a socially minded playwright who had several plays staged at Manchester’s Gaiety Theatre, was clearly very interested in the interplay between the servant class and their employers. He was also interested in intergenerational relationships and this play, first staged in 1911, is as much about the gulf in attitude and understanding between young Leonard Timbrell and his father as it is about Mary.

The couple are obliged to marry and do a good job of coping with the situation until Leonard’s runaway tongue causes his father to cut off their allowance entirely. While Mary grows ever anxious over money and the health of their child, Leonard lounges around and vaguely considers pawning his pocket watch. A sub-Wildean aesthete lacking only the lily in his lapel, he was a source of torment and confusion to his rather Victorian father even before this latest indiscretion. Though he’s perceptive, expressive, and quite unlike his stuffy elder brother, he is also, as he confesses, quite ‘rotten with egoism’ and is capable of being just as blind and cruel as his father when he chooses. At times his aestheticism feels like a defence for idleness (he’s a writer, but there’s no real sense that he’s particularly gifted) and the whole situation like an amusing adventure, while Mary’s whole life and sense of herself has been uprooted.

The situation also seems to awaken something in Leonard’s cowed mother. Though she repeatedly and rather too vocally insists on her own weakness in the face of her husband’s bluster, she also confesses that she believes that there’s “something in what these suffrage people say.”

Jack Farthing manages to convey the conflicting aspects of Leonard’s personality; he is charismatic and honest yet oddly hollow and casual in his cruelty, quite astonishingly unlikeable at times. He views everything at a remove, barely acknowledges his son, but seems – briefly at least – saddened by his inability to feel anything more deeply than he does. Katie McGuinness has an apt placidity as Mary, a woman used to accepting the various hands that life has dealt her, but who is also quite unshakeable when she sets her mind to a thing. Eunice Roberts also gives an intriguingly shaded performance as Mrs Timbrell, a woman who – at times at least – seems far more questing and aware than others of her generation, but whose love for her son blinds her to his faults.

Monkhouse’s play sets its stall deftly. The situation and characters are elegantly established and while it’s not as socially probing as a play by someone like Granville-Barker, it remains a strong piece of comic writing with a conscience and would probably have been considered rather daring in its day. But the play loses steam by the second half and his portrait of Leonard and Mary’s life together is less convincing. The final scene sees everything tied up rather too quickly and neatly (when one learns that Mary has been stepping out with the Jonsonianly monikered milkman George Truefitt it’s not that hard to guess how things will end up for her) and there’s only the lightest sense that anyone has learned anything, Mary excepted, from this unfortunate episode.

Auriol Smith’s production is pleasingly pacey  for a revival of an Edwardian play and this despite some lengthy scene changes. That the furniture is shifted and the cushions plumped by women in housemaids’ attire does serve as a neat reminder of how these people’s lives were oiled and their homes made comfortable by the labour of others, but these interludes also serve to slow down and break up the flow of the drama.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Making of Moo at the Orange Tree

Context is all. When Nigel Dennis’s satirical play premiered at the Royal Court in 1957 it was met with a number of boos of outrage amid the applause. Half a century on, in Sam Walters’ revival at the Orange Tree, the play, a condensed and cynical canter through the creation of a religion, lacks the same outrage factor; it’s more like a small child making a big noise in restaurant and revelling in the attention.

In an unnamed African country, the colonial Comptons, having accidentally killed the local river god by building a dam, decide to create their own replacement to keep the natives in check. hey imbue their new project with a back-story and with commandments and, inspired by the constant lowing of cattle outside the window of their wicker-furnished sitting room, they name their deity Moo.

In the Second Act Dennis shunts events forwards a couple of years to the point where the Moovian religion has grown into a cult complete with red-robed followers who are not averse to the odd human sacrifice in order to keep their god happy. When a pair of English interlopers arrives to find out what has become of the Comptons, they are shocked and appalled by what they find. To achieve this dramatic shift, the lighting designer John Harris has bathed the Orange Tree stage in red while set designer Tim Meacock has adorned it with cows’ skulls; the Comptons’ wicker furniture meanwhile has been turned into a makeshift pulpit.

In the final scenes of the play, we are presented with the next step along the path. The Moovian faith has shed the blood-hungry and drum-beating fervour of its youth and become aged, staid and respectable. It now has deacons and missionaries to spread its message; there are even some Moovian converts in London and wealthy philanthropists arrive from abroad bearing their chequebooks – yet the play ends with a downbeat glimmer that there might be a fundamentalist resurgence on the cards, that this period of tea and cakes tranquillity is only an interlude and that Moo and its more ardent followers might soon demand more blood.

As satire, this is fairly broad and heavy-handed stuff that seems childishly pleased with the extremes to which it is willing to go (William, the Comptons’ manservant turned very reluctant Pope of Moo, is forced to wear a giant phallus and a silly hat). But its in dealing in extremes that it lets itself down; the writing contains flashes of wit and invention but Dennis seems to get carried away in his wish to give religion a good kicking and he contents himself (mostly) with swiping at easy targets and reducing complex ideas to basic generalities, rather than digging deeper under the skin of what it means to believe.

The play generates a fair few flutters of laughter and Walters’ reasonably brisk production is aided by committed performances from Philip York and Amanda Royle as the socks-and-sandals-sporting colonial engineer and his wife, turned Moovian patriarch and holy mouthpiece (therefore, for her at least, acquiring a freedom of thought and voice denied to her as a colonial wife). But it hasn’t aged particularly well; it's hard to discern the tiger-like thing that Kenneth Tynan described, as it hits its audience over the head repeatedly with its ideas - for every sharp and well-targeted dig, there are several clumsy hammer blows.

Reviewed for musicOMH

The Orange Tree and a Dubious Anniversary

Off to the Orange Tree again last week to see De Monfort, a revival of a play by Joanna Baillie. Byron is apparently meant to have said of her, that if it takes testicles to write a good tragedy, Joanna Baillie must have had to borrow some. Which I think is a compliment. Maybe. It certainly piqued my interest.

First performed in 1800, De Monfort is part of a series of works she composed under the title of Plays on the Passions, and this one was her tragedy on the theme of hatred. Now the Orange Tree has a good track record for digging up long forgotten things but, despite the fact that the Finborough are also staging a Baillie play at the moment – Witchcraft – this feels like a stupendous misfire.

The titular De Monfort is a brooding, moody chap who has long harboured a grudge against Rezenvelt for some past offence that is never really made clear. It gnaws at him, it won’t let him rest. Even his sister Jane, who rather improbably has the capacity to make footmen weak at the be-stockinged knees with her apparent radiance, is unable to dissuade him of the folly of holding onto this irrational loathing.

Eventually, after meandering along in a similar vein for (quite) some time, with Justin Avoth’s De Monfort pacing the stage, snarling and generally being disgruntled, he mistakenly comes to believe that Rezenvelt has designs on his sister and they clash with predictably messy consequences (though actually much of the mess occurs off stage). With Rezenvelt dead, you’d think that would be it, but no, sadly, the play continues on after this for some time after this with a long drawn out final scene at a monastery – replete with Latin incantations, writhing and rending of clothes, abundant nuns and midnight calls of ‘murder.’ Perhaps in other hands, this could all have been ominous and atmospheric but the production felt mis-pitched from the start and this lengthy finale simply postponed De Monfort’s inevitable demise for far longer than was necessary, leading to much seat fidgeting and watch checking amongst the audience.

The ornately costumed cast went through the motions but, with no emotional hook to hold onto, no grasp of what drove this man, his plight did not move, it merely irritated. Or sent people to sleep. Literally. I spotted a good scattering of lolling heads. Indeed the Orange Tree's nap-o-meter was set higher than I've seen it in a while and there were a couple of empty spaces after the interval. I even heard the word ‘codswallop’ being uttered by one tweed jacketed man as we were leaving. You have to love Richmond.

Oh, and, unrelated I know, but at some point while I was away in Italy this blog hit its two year mark. I shall spare you any overly introspective musings on why I blog or what I blog; I simply want to reiterate how glad I am to have met so many interesting people and made so many friends through writing this thing. Now I’m off to pour myself a glass of gin. Cheers.

Orange Tree Unchained

Last week I also found the time to drift over to Richmond for a preview of the new show at the Orange Tree. It was a weekday matinee and, as a result, I suspect I was the youngest person in the audience by some wide margin. The couple next to me had quite an interval picnic going on with cling-film wrapped sandwiches and bags of crisps and I was even able to notch up my first sighting of a thermos flask in quite some time.

The Orange Tree’s current production is Chains of Dew, part of a season of neglected work by woman writers. It was written in 1922 by American playwright Susan Glaspell (No? Me neither, though apparently she won a Pulitzer in her day) and has gone unperformed since its original production.

Things begin in a New York apartment where Seymore Standish, a poet from the Mid West, is visiting his radical friends, Nora, a birth control campaigner with fashionable bobbed hair, and Leon, a liberal newspaper editor. Seymore bemoans the constraints of his conservative existence back home in Bluff City where his creativity is stifled by a respectable job, a sweet, unworldly wife, and the countless social obligations that come from being a man of standing in a town such as his. The first scene didn’t bode well. It took a good, long while to establish the characters and felt rather static and uneasy. Wavering accents amongst the cast didn’t help matters, and the scene could have been a good deal tauter and shorter if they’d snipped out some lengthy and repetitive business with a mimeograph machine.

The true meat of the comedy only revealed itself when Glaspell shows us Seymore on his home turf and we see that, for all his protests, he is rather content with his straight-laced life, composed as it is of bridge games, church meetings and rounds of golf. So when Nora and Leon show up in Bluff City, Seymore is understandably distraught to see these two separate aspects of his life collide. His sophisticated, self-assured New York set are as out of place in his home town as it is possible to be. They are very keen to liberate Seymore, to free his inner artist from the shackles of respectability, oblivious to the fact that he is quite happy as he is. Instead it is his wife, Diantha – though he insists on calling her Dotty and casually dismissing her every attempt to better herself – who is excited by their arrival, sensing a chance at liberation.

Though these later scenes are very funny, Glaspell’s play is more than just a comedy of two worlds colliding; there is anger at its heart, a bitter undercurrent. She is aware that it will take more than just a few daring hair cuts to execute true social change. And though Seymore’s wife is able to taste the possibility of a new existence, Glaspell recognises that things don’t change as easily as that. A taste of freedom is all Diantha gets and the play ends on something of a downbeat note.

The ensemble cast work well together and David Annen plays Seymore with a good dash of charisma and makes him into something more than just a self-absorbed hypocrite. I was also very taken with Helen Ryan’s performance as Seymore’s wise and wonderful mother.

Fans of heavy-handed symbolism will enjoy the repeated references to a picture of the Sistine Madonna, which is removed from its hook when Diantha first meets Seymore's friends – and then later rehung. But the play was, once it hit its stride, something of a joy: poignant and perceptive, and very entertaining with it.

A(nother) Night At The Orange Tree

There are many reasons not to like the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. It’s in Richmond for one thing. And it stages safe, solid productions designed to appeal to Richmond audiences. These tend to be done in period costume on naturalistic sets, which usually take an age to change between scenes, as there is always much twiddling with side-tables and crystal decanters and silverware. There's also a faintly irritating all-in-the-family taint to the productions too, which nearly always star Octavia Walters, daughter of the theatre’s founder and artistic director Sam Walters.

And yet, for all this, I feel considerable affection for the Orange Tree. It doesn’t tend to experiment or to surprise, but instead it does a particular thing and does it very well. In the main this means staging rarely performed plays with some kind of social weight to them. Last season was all about the work of GBS and his contemporaries, this season it’s a more loosely linked collection of plays by women dramatists.

The last thing I saw there was Daphne du Maurier’s The Years Between, perhaps not an amazing bit of writing, but still a gripping story, well-told, that questioned a woman’s position, both in the context of marriage and in society in general, in a manner that I found quite resonant.

The current production is Elizabeth Barker’s Chains was written in 1909 and is about duty and responsibility. It concerns Charley Wilson, a ‘quill-pusher’ in the City, who’s life is stirred up by the announcement of a colleague that he’s going to quit his steady job and chance his luck in Australia. Though Charley’s existence is one of hard graft and ceaseless routine, living from Sunday to Sunday, it takes his friend’s decision to really wake him up to how unhappy he is with his lot. His dilemma is reflected against that of his sister-in-law Maggie (played by – well fancy that – a certain Octavia Walters – who admittedly is pretty good in the role). Unlike Charley’s wife, who is an uncomplaining, eternally optimistic sort, her sister Maggie has fire inside her; though she is engaged to marry a wealthy man, and is, as a result, guaranteed a comfortable life, she burns to do something more, to see something more of the world – to live. She sympathises with Charley’s predicament and urges him to follow his instincts, despite the upset it might cause.

Much of the play focuses on Charley grappling with the decision to stay or to leave, to do what’s expected of him or to take a chance - to do ‘the done thing’ or the right thing - but though this eventually became a little repetitive, I loved the rather dark way Barker chooses to end things, twisting what should be a happy announcement into something far more ambiguous.

Though it was very Orange Tree - in every sense - this was a strong production, and it passed the crucial in-the-round test: despite the cosiness of the venue, the stately pacing of the drama and the average age of the audience, I didn’t spot a single sleeper – not always the case at this particular venue.

The Orange Tree Delivers

Last week’s bumper week o’ theatre ended on a pleasant high. I was off to the Orange Tree, out in Richmond, for the first play in their new autumn season. I have a real soft spot for the Orange Tree. Their last season, composed of work by George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, was genuinely fascinating and this new production of the The Years Between, a play by Daphne Du Maurier, was well chosen, echoing themes – about the shifting position of women in society in the late 19th and early 20th century – that had provided something of a spine for those previous productions.

Years is set during the Second World War and concerns a woman whose husband is missing in action, his plane was shot down over the sea and he is most likely dead. In his absence, his wife Diana sets about rebuilding and reshaping her life. Reluctantly she stands as a Member of Parliament in her husband’s stead and makes plans to marry another man. Three years pass before a phone call brings news that her husband is still alive and the play then focuses on how Diana deals with this fact and the knowledge that the life she has built in his absence will be irreparably changed.

The play makes it clear that her husband was a difficult and particular man before he went away, so when he returns, gaunt and weak, he is keen for everything to be as it once was. But, of course, this cannot be. Diana has grown in confidence during the intervening years, and her husband, Michael, comes back to a life – and wife – very distant and different from what he left behind.

Years is a compelling if not outstanding piece of writing, it doesn’t really have the macabre edge of du Maurier’s novels and stories (apparently she was drawing here on unhappiness in her own marriage plus a real event that happened near to where she lived in Cornwall) but, get this, I cared about the characters, I got caught up in these people’s lives in a way that just didn’t happen during, hmm, say, Awake and Sing! It helped that the acting was good, especially Mark Tandy as the twitchy, emotionally complex colonel.

This wasn’t an absolutely blow-you-away production but I enjoyed it more than anything else I’ve seen this week, despite – or perhaps – because of the Orange Tree’s quirks. Sets are usually cluttered with rugs, mahogany side tables, antimacassars and the like – they’re clearly not big fans of the minimalist approach to set design – and they take an absolute age shifting this stuff about between scenes. The theatre is also in-the-round so at least one pivotal moment is guaranteed to be obscured by the back of someone’s head, but the Orange Tree knows its strengths, it knows its core audience (older than me by a good few decades) and it does a certain kind of production very well indeed. Measure of quality at the Orange Tree? The number of people having a bit of a nap during the play (easy to ascertain given the layout) and, for once, I didn’t spot one lolling head.