A KIND OF ALASKA Pinter ME AND MY FRIEND Plowman, Orange Tree: till 30 June

A KIND OF ALASKA: Harold Pinter
ACT ONE OF ME AND MY FRIEND: Gillian Plowman

Orange Tree: Tkts 020 8940 0088
Runs: 1h 50m: one interval, till June 30
Review: Vera Lustig, 13 June 2002

Inspired teaming of two plays about people returning to 'normal' society after a long absence. Two young directors strut their stuff. A pleasurable revisit.Sleeping sickness was rife around the end of the Great War, and many patients did not regain consciousness till the advent of the drug L-DOPA after World War II. In Pinter's elliptical, atmospheric play, Deborah is one such 'sleeping beauty', and the play opens with her awakening, watched over by a gentle, melancholic doctor.

Svetlana Dimcovic's spare production achieves a great deal. It is imbued with a sense of tragedy, of a wasted life, of lost innocence, both at a personal and political level. It has an appropriate gravitas and delicacy; and Fiz Marcus, as Deborah, with the baffled mind of a teenage girl trapped in a middle-aged body, has formidable presence. Her Deborah is a quaint, pedantic, demure young lady, a throwback to a more (superficially) gracious age. What we do not get, though, is a fresh-faced, tomboy quality that would make Deborah's interrupted life all the more poignant. Louise Yates impresses as her sister, the bearer of news that Deborah's childhood idyll is no more.

Gillian Plowman's award-winning ME AND MY FRIEND was written in 1990, when a reform of the care of psychiatric patients led to their being decanted from hospitals into what is laughingly called 'the community', ie halfway houses. The first act of Plowman's play, which has the busy feel of a docusoap, shows two youngish ex-patients adapting to life in a council flat: the domestic chores, the nervous rehearsal of job interviews. The two actors establish a fine working relationships. As psychiatric patients, though, they don't convince. They appear to feel too good in their own skins. The production seems predicated on the belief that psychiatric patients are 'just like us'. Granted, there's a wide overlap between the disturbed and the supposedly sane – but not that wide, partly thanks to the zonking side-effects of mood controlling medication . . .

So plumpish, blond Adam Kay sports jazzily mismatched clothes: tweed jacket over cheerfully printed shorts, and does it with such panache that he seems to be making a fashion statement, like Kate Winslet with the fetchingly skew-whiff haircut in the film IRIS. Still, it was a pleasure to revisit these two linked yet contrasting plays.

A Kind of Alsaka
Hornby: John Cunningham
Deborah: Fiz Marcus
Pauline: Louise Yates

Director: Svetlana Dimcovic

Me and My Friend
Oz: Adam Kay
Bunny: Morgan Symes

Director: Paul Griffiths

Production Team
Design: Sam Dowson
Lighting: Sam Akester

2002-06-26 19:46:05