AMY'S VIEW.

London

AMY’S VIEW
by David Hare

Garrick Theatre
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS: 0870 890 1104
www.nimaxtheatres.com (booking fee in both cases)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 20 November 2006

Revival plays to this play’s strengths.
Amy’s View, premiered in 1997 at the Lyttelton Theatre, emerges in Peter Hall’s revival as a traditional, solid West End play. Adjectives queue up to be applied: ‘civilised’, ‘witty’, ‘middle-brow’ among them.

None of these should damn with faint praise. David Hare deliberately set out to write Amy on the once-standard 4-act model (if it’s good enough for Chekhov…) and shows himself master of the extended scene, with characters coming and going realistically, and issues flowing through lifelike proceedings, sometimes gently, occasionally rising to the crash of a mighty wave.

The play itself embodies the values of Theatre, even if those values are compromised at times. They have to fight their corner against a younger generation impatient with plays like Amy’s View. But Hare’s form represents Amy’s values of tolerance and love. She is leading-actress Esme’s daughter and 3rd generation of the family whose home houses most of the action, until the play relocates to a theatre, where, amid stark bareness, there’s finally an expression of the physical and emotional closeness even Amy never manages in life.

Characters are both given a voice and called into question. Death, decay and events interrupt but never destroy the living characters. Such big events happen offstage; the action deals with their consequences. They are often revealed long after happening, when trauma has solidified into habituation.

Simon Higlett’s detailed set represents the apparently solid certainty of Esme’s life. Her walls are filled with paintings by her husband Bernard, prematurely dead and someone whose love had taken her by surprise decades before. It’s when her life crumbles the action moves to backstage theatrical bareness and a post-shipwreck scene strikingly evoking loss and love (Peter Mumford’s lighting reflects the shift from the warmly-lit home).

Hall ensures significant moments are highlighted without disturbing the surface flow. And the central mother/daughter relationship is aptly handled by Felicity Kendal’s Esme, with whom everything, apart from telling memories of her artist-husband, has a surface lightness, and Jenna Russell’s convincingly earnest Amy. Gawn Grainger knows how to let Esme’s enamoured neighbour emerge quietly and so more forcefully in his moral ambiguity.

Amy: Jenna Russell
Dominic: Ryan Kiggell
Evelyn: Antonia Pemberton
Esme: Felicity Kendal
Frank: Gawn Grainger
Toby: Geoff Breton

Director: Peter Hall
Designer: Simon Higlett
Lighting: Peter Mumford
Sound: Gregory Clarke
Assistant director: Ben Woolf

2006-11-21 12:32:26