AFORE NIGHT COME by David Rudkin. Young Vic

London

AFORE NIGHT COME
by David Rudkin

Young Vic Theatre To 13 October 2001
Runs 2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS 020 7928 6363
Review Timothy Ramsden 26 September

The Young Vic provides an apt environment for the dark day of Rudkin’s powerful piece. It may be set geographically close to BBC radio’s The Archers but Rudkin’s debut play, forty years old, is dramatic leagues away from an everyday story of country folk, involving as it does ritual human slaughter.

Rudkin drew on student experience working on a Bromsgrove fruit farm. The usual group interactions and responses to a vulnerable outsider are twisted tight among his pear pickers. The farm-workers vary from Jumbo and Taff, who have some reflective powers, through Johnny and Tiny, locked in a muddle of religion, eroticism and fear, to the others, for whom social and economic grievances are clouded in a mystic sense of the earth’s barrenness and the need to root out the supposed cause.

The killing, which in Rufus Norris’ Royal National Theatre Studio production, includes realistic disembowelling and neck-breaking, is played out against a thunderous pest-control helicopter deadening the land with chemical spray.

It’s a theme going back to Oedipus, and around Night’s time it was also articulated in TV plays by Dennis Potter and John Bowen. Menace gathers from the first, as the unseen workforce announces itself by belches and nose-blowings. Ian McNeil’s set is claustrophobic, with a low ceiling of pear-shaped lamp-bulbs which flash at the approaching storm that underlines the accumulating human aggression.

This takes control when the chain of command breaks down. Elsewhere on the farm the wrong pears have been picked; the owner diverts workers from their central jobs and the foreman bows to group pressure to abandon the old Irishman whose death will purge the pent-up fury.

Norris keeps up a natural workaday flow that imperceptibly leads from crowded busy-ness to moments of fear with a character isolated, either alone or amid group hostility. A strong acting company clarify all the character dynamics in this vivid revival.

Jim: Christopher Bland
Tiny: Daniel Cerqueira
Albert: Edward Clayton
Gloria: Zoe Dawson
Spens: Patrick Drury
Jeff: Tim Harris
Mrs Trevis: Mary Healey
Roche: Ewan Hooper
Taffy Hughes: Richard Lynch
Johnny 'Hobnails' Carter: Laurence Mitchell
Jumbo: Roger Morlidge
Mr Hawkins: Peter Pacey
Ginger: Adam Shaw
Larry: Jack Tarlton

Director: Rufus Norris
Designer: Ian McNeil
Costumes: Joan Wadge
Lighting: Rick Fisher
Sound: Paul Arditti

2001-09-27 02:00:51