ALPHABETICAL ORDER

London.

ALPHABETICAL ORDER
by Michael Frayn.

Hampstead Theatre To 16 May 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm & 6, 13 May 2.30pm.
Audio-described 9 May 3pm.
Captioned/Post-show speech-to-text discussion 5 May.
Runs 2hr 10min One interval.

TICKETS: 020 7722 9301.
www.hampsteadtheatrwe.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 22 April.

Revival in the wrong manner – but applause for Hampstead’s hardworking stage-management.
This ought to have been the slice of cream at the centre of Hampstead Theatre’s 50th Anniversary season, where three revivals of plays significant to its half-century mix with a couple of premieres. Instead, it’s the hole in the doughnut.

During the 1970s Hampstead helped launch Michael Frayn’s dramatic career, transferring this play and Clouds to the West End. Set in a provincial newspaper’s cuttings-library, where the emotional lives of the paper’s employees are as disordered as the cuttings over which librarian Lucy presides, it’s a period picture now, as brown and furled as the files of old newsprint littering the room. In pre-computer days, journalists sit nuzzling a pencil, reflecting negligently over a vaguely-remembered quote, getting by on an invisible inner genius or old pro expertise.

Besides having become something of a requiem for the old newspaper world, it suggests impending changes, in newspaper-land and the country in general, through new library assistant Lesley. She sums everyone up within minutes, tidies the unruly archive within days and in her newly-imposed rules gives a sense of the Prime Minister who ended the decade.

True, Margaret Thatcher might not seem an obvious parallel for a newcomer who organises a worker-revolution. But Lesley isn’t about trade union activity; in retrospect, her enterprise is about setting-up the staff as a new company.

Unfortunately, Christopher Luscombe’s production scuppers the play, as period piece or as comedy. He has had successes with Alan Bennett (London’s current Enjoy) and Alan Ayckbourn. Unfortunately, he treats Frayn’s play as if it were in the more upfront manner of these writers.

What’s lacking is any sense of the day-to-day. Lucy tells her new assistant that everyone’s putting on a performance to impress her. But there’s no difference between that and the rest of the action, of how ordinary the working day is in a place cut off from the world it reports on – until a late revelation brings reality crashing in. A fine cast are thus marooned in an inappropriate style. Only Gawn Grainger’s monosyllabic Arnold avoids this, making him the only genuinely funny, and credible, character on stage.

Geoffrey: Ian Talbot.
Lesley: Chloe Newsome.
Arnold: Gawn Grainger.
John: Jonathan Guy Lewis.
Lucy: Imogen Stubbs.
Nora: Annette Badland.
Wally: Michael Garner.

Director: Christopher Luscombe.
Designer: Janet Bird.
Lighting: Tim Mitchell.
Sound: Fergus O’Hare.
Dialect coach: Martin McKellan.
Assistant director: Sarah Norman.

2009-04-27 11:04:39