ABANDONMENT. To 26 April.
York
ABANDONMENT
by Kate Atkinson
Theatre Royal To 26 April 2003
Tue-Sat 7.30pm No performance 18 April
Audio-described: 25 April
BSL Signed: 16 April
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
TICKETS: 01904 623568
Review: Timothy Ramsden
Female-focus family drama with strong central characters.'Kate Atkinson’s Abandonment' reads the poster outside York’s Theatre Royal, but neither Atkinson’s home city nor her adopted Edinburgh has ignored her. The Theatre Royal adapted her debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum in 2000, the year Edinburgh’s Traverse premiered her first stage work - a satisfying, honest play.
A tale of two epochs, it’s what was once called ‘middle-brow entertainment’ – implying limitations but not condescension. Look closely and the patterning is evident. At normal distance it’s an involving, humane story. The focus is female in a mono-ethnic, middle-class world of articulate people. All men are cads, through weakness or sheer self-gratification. Fair enough; some of the sisters are none-too-nice either.
Inasmuch as they are sisters. Recently divorced Elizabeth moves into a large Victorian villa. Her family round her - including catty-sister Kitty, who ironically becomes the only person of practical use - we discover Liz was a foundling. Abandoned after birth, she’s since faced the emotional desertion of her step-mother and sisters.
Almost every present-day character ends up abandoned; lesbian sister Susie, even house-renovator Jim, fond father caught in a philander. There’s a lovely comic moment when Liz hears about Jim. Body language leaning into sympathy, she learns it’s his fault and goes coldly formal, all folded-arms and frown.
Meanwhile, a ghostly governess from 1875 haunts the house. Touchingly played by Catherine Hamilton (dab hand at a wistfully recurrent Chopin waltz) we learn, at the cost of a melodramatic moment, why her soul’s restless.
Social shifts may have swept away from Atkinson’s world the economic, and resulting sexual, oppression Agnes experienced, but emotional abandonment remains in the lives we now believe that we control. Emotional attachments, inside and outside the family, seem necessary and leave abandonment an ever-present danger.
There’s some tendency to over-deliberateness in performances; perhaps some novel-like dialogue – doing the actor’s work for them – nudges towards this. But Julie Teal matches Hamilton as strong moral centres while Dawn Allsopp’s superb drawing-room set fills York’s stage with a mix of realism, romantic tree-lined vista and subliminal Gothic excess, changing colour with era under Richard G. Jones’ lighting.
Agnes: Catherine Hamilton
Elizabeth: Julie Teal
Susie/Gertie: Caroline Gruber
Kitty/Laetitia: Katerina Jugati
Jim/Reveerend Scobie: Marcello Walton
Enid/Lavender: Christine Cox
Alex/Merric: David Leonard
Director: Damian Cruden
Designer: Dawn Allsopp
Lighting: Richard G. Jones
Musical Director: Christopher Madin
2003-04-17 02:58:24