ALICE TRILOGY. To 10 December.
London
ALICE TRILOGY
by Tom Murphy
Royal Court (Jerwood Theatre Downstairs) To 10 December 2005
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3.30pm
BSL Signed 7 December
Post-show Talk: 22 Nov
Runs 2hr 15min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7565 5000
www.royalcourttheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 November
Not easygoing, but be patient. An elusive, deeply-felt play in an outstanding Royal Court production.
Give this idea to a number of playwrights: portray a woman at 3 stages of life - in her mid-20s, around 40 then, finally, 50. Few of the varied responses would be as elusive or contained as Tom Murphy’s Alice Trilogy. Yet few would be more ultimately rewarding, more piercingly memorable than this play. And if the idea of different productions already seems tantalising, it’s only because Juliet Stevenson’s star (but unshowy) performance leaves the question of how Alice would appear without Stevenson’s magnetic performance, which attracts sympathy in its own right.
The production is Royal Court Artistic Director Ian Rickson at his best. Quietly sustained (if it were music – and in many ways it is – the volume would rarely be marked above piano), the play first develops Alice’s consciousness as a young mother, confining herself in the attic with alcohol before collecting her young children, communing with her questioning other self (an excellently tactful, white-faced Dearbhle Crotty emerging silently from the black, managing just the occasional laugh between the two of her).
Then, in the most realistic middle-act, Alice has an unlikely meeting with a flickered-out old flame, before finally, in an airport restaurant, being most alone, with her husband. Her voice now is disengaged by amplification; her life has brought her to this isolation while the affluent, near-silent husband eats on, unregarded, his occasional comments unrelated to her, impinging on Alice’s consciousness only accidentally. This is the fate looming since the drink-laced attic a quarter-century before. She talks of herself in the third-person, a Beckett-like figure at the culmination of her life in roles of mother, lover, wife. Those tenuous contacts of earlier acts – a drinking mother about to collect children, a meeting with a former lover – are severed.
Always the outer world is a blur; a vaguely heard radio downstairs, passers-by at the gasworks, the egregious waiter – and her husband. Except finally, when a waitress, strange herself in carrying a tray without using it, expresses someone else’s misery. Like most Murphy plays, Alice is far from easy to follow but eventually hits home with a deep impact.
Alice: Juliet Stevenson
Al/Waitress: Dearbhle Crotty
Jimmy/Waiter: Stanley Townsend
Bundler/Official: Christopher Patrick Nolan
Bill: John Stahl
Director: Ian Rickson
Designer: Jeremy Herbert
Lighting: Nigel Edwards
Sound: Ian Dickinson
Composer: Stephen Warbeck
Dialect coach: Joan Washington
Company voice work: Patsy Rodenburg
Assistant director: Elinna Manni
2005-11-21 16:14:53