AFTER LIVERPOOL & GAMES. To 4 February.
London
AFTER LIVERPOOL & GAMES
by James Saunders
OrangeTree Theatre in rep to 4 February 2006
24-25 Jan, 2-4 Feb 7.45pm Mat 28 Jan 4pm 2 Feb 2.30pm
Runs 1hr 45min One interval
TICKETS: 020 8940 3633
www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 January
Imaginatively inventive or wearisomely tricksy, Saunders has his ways with words.
Interrupting the Orange Tree run of the late James Saunders’ reworking of Vanbrugh’s A Journey to London are brief runs of several one-act Saunders plays. The first pair suggests the single act was a good length for a playwright who enjoyed provoking with words and examining how they lead the mind along winding personal and public paths.
Written after a Merseyside symposium for playwrights, the first play could easily be seen as a response to the collective word-games creating modern British drama. After a quick prologue of conversational phrases made absurd in joint captivity, nameless pairs, switching partners, talk abstractly. The abstract setting means the mini-dialogues easily resonate with anyone’s experiences. Words conceal, seek to please, flatter, scorn, express frustration, disappointment or anger, usually indirectly, but in more extended sequences with eventual frankness.
There’s a single apple. People who clearly want to eat it refuse to do so. Finally, it’s shared, a solution that seems happy (though it might not be entirely hygienic). What’s sure is that Auriol Smith’s production catches every swing of Saunders’ language. It’s a clean, brisk production that finds out the emotional spots – a woman speaks of trusting her partner, then is shocked when he slaps her gratuitously, another woman apologises for hurting a lover’s ego till his sullen indignity provokes her to anger. Oh yes, words can hurt.
Games turns the spotlight from playwrights to actors and director, specifically the sort of intense, political collective common in British Theatre from the late 60s to the early 80s. Though ‘spotlight’ is hardly apt, as the houselights stay on throughout Sam Walters’ precision-production with its temporary cessation for the audience to join in the kind of eternal ‘issue’ discussions to which such companies were prone.
These actors’ subject is the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese babies and women by American soldiers. But it pulls back from that to look at the actor trapped in pretence: the actor’s subject is him/herself. Performed with an ensemble discipline that doesn’t (unlike the Vietnam GIs) undermine individuality, the play raises intriguing questions without, like its companion, quite maintaining its dramatic momentum.
After Liverpool
Cast: John Paul Connelly, Sam Dowson, Nick Earnshaw, Claudia Elmhirst, John Hodgkinson, Fiona Mollison, Joanna Van Gyseghem, Thomas Wheatley
Director: Auriol Smith
Games
Cast Robert Benfield, Mairead Carty, Paul Goodwin, Sophie Trott
Director: Sam Walters
Designer: Sam Dowson
Lighting: Kevin Leach
Assistant directors: Imogen Bond, Amy Hodge
2006-01-24 09:28:57