AMY'S VIEW. To 5 April.

Salisbury/Northampton

AMY'S VIEW
by David Hare

Salisbury Playhouse To 15th March
Runs 2hr 35min One Interval then
Royal Theatre Northampton 20 March-5 April 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 27,29 March 2.30pm
Audio-described 25 March
BSL Signed 1 April

Tickets 01722 320333: http://www.salisburyplayhouse.com (Salisbury)
01604 624811
www.northamptontheatres.com (Northampton)
Review Mark Courtice: 22 February

Theatre is not boring – because we say so.Esme is a distinguished actress whose Ophelia was good enough to be remembered by stockbrokers. She was married to an artist “of the English Impressionist school”, now dead and just unregarded enough to be fruitful ground for an academic thesis.

This faded representative of art as a good thing is Hare’s champion of theatre, pitted against Dominic, daughter Amy’s brash boyfriend and champion of film, TV and the gossip column. Amy, relentlessly good and loving, is the collateral damage of this struggle – betrayed by the boyfriend and coping with a mother who finds that the pillars of the establishment (artistic and financial) have foundations of clay.

The problem is that to make the case for the power of theatre you have to produce a powerful play – not a powerful argument set on a stage. As Esme’s struggle to remain true to the redemptive power of her art, the play is too much of an argument and, despite some pleasures in the performances, Natalie Wilson's production sometimes compounds this difficulty.

Long static arguments seem even more leaden when the protagonists line up in arrowhead formation along the walls of the set. Visually the influence of dead painter Bernard (vital as a manifestation of the indestructible power of art) is weakened by unconvincing detail in furniture and the pictures on the walls.

Gillian Hanna takes the huge part of Esme in hand at the start, driving the relationships with Dominic and her elderly mother-in-law (a neat, well observed study by Tessa Worsley); in Act Three she invests Esmé's bravery in the face of financial ruin with real power and pathos; it is only in Act Four this tension cannot be sustained.

Poppy Miller avoids the trap of making Amy a dull goody-goody by providing the part with lots of feeling, often on tip toe with suppressed energy. Douglas Rao gets the cad spot on as Dominic - I guess its Hare’s fault we do not get the intellectual, attractive man who Amy fell in love with, and who would make greater sense of the climactic ending.

Dominic Tyghe: Douglas Rao
Amy Thomas: Poppy Miller
Evelyn Thomas: Tessa Worsley
Esme Allen: Gillian Hanna
Frank Oddie: Robert Whelan
Toby Cole: Michael Thomson

Director: Natalie Wilson
Designer: Matthew Wright
Lighting: James Farncombe
Sound: David Bennion-Pedley

2003-02-25 01:22:19