A FAMILY AFFAIR. To 13 January.
London
A FAMILY AFFAIR
by Alexander Ostrovsky translated by Nick Dear
Arcola Theatre To 13 January 2007
Mon-Sat 8pm
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7503 1646
www.arcolatheatre,com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 18 December
Lively play, lively translation, lively production, all fitting together.
It isn’t only the title of Alexander Ostrovsky’s play, from mid-19th century Tsarist Russia, that might recall Alan Ayckbourn’s bitter comedy A Small Family Business. Though, in Nick Dear’s frank, unfusty version, the earlier play is more nakedly vicious, both take apart the image of honest business and the loyalties supposedly inherent to family life.
From merchant’s daughter Olimpiada, desperately seeking a husband as she fantasises, as might a modern teenager with her head in a lifestyle glossy, to the debt-evasion techniques her merchant father Samson concocts with drunken solicitor Sysoy, just about everyone’s out for what they can get, including the solicitor, Jane Bertish’s snobbish matchmaker and Lazar, brought up by Samson, and concealing his own trickery within bouquets of flattery for his employer.
As the penultimate act culminates in the marriage of Lazar and Olimpiada, all seems happy, with the characters dancing. But musicians Bow and Bellows (violin and accordion) turn the waltz into a lurid, speeded-up caricature. It’s a reminder of another Ayckbourn play, his early exposure of money talking in social relationships, as everyone dances to the tune of arriviste Sidney in the sharp final moments of Absurd Person Singular.
The sense of space is increased beyond even the normal Arcola roominess by designer Naomi Wilkinson providing no side walls and leaving doors open with a view towards the dressing-room; this is a society where everyone is showing off and putting on appearances.
So performances in Serdar Bilis’s energetic production aptly play up, creating a sense of individual opportunism, where everyone calculates self-interest in the most apt manner, whether it be Jonathan Coyne’s bullish merchant or the Uriah Heep-like hypocrisy of Philip Arditti’s Lazar.
The mother-and-daughter relationship’s no better than that of master-and-man. Sally Leonard is a fashion-hungry, sulkily impatient teenager to Rosemary McHale’s stolidly suffering, dim-witted mother. Bertish soon has the verbal gloves off when her customers don’t stump up the requisite fee, in a class-bashing torrent of abuse. And Glyn Pritchard is tactfully restrained, keeping his running-gag drunkard’s line (every tipple’s “First of the day”) fresh in this lively revival of a scathing comedy.
Samson Silych Bolshov: Jonathan Coyne
Agrafena Kondratyevna: Rosemary McHale
Olimpiada Samsonova: Sally Leonard
Lazar Elizarich Podkhalyuzin: Philip Arditti
Ustinya Naumovna: Jane Bertish
Sysoy Psoich Rispolozhensky: Glyn Pritchard
Fominishna: Eve Pearce
Tishka: Rotimi Pearce
Director: Serdar Bilis
Designer: Naomi Wilkinson
Lighting: Anna Watson
Sound: Wayne Harris
Composers/Musicians: Bow & Bellows (Sally Davies & Martina Schwarz)
Movement: Tom Roden
Assistant director: Niki Samer
2006-12-27 01:36:23