AND ALLTHE CHILDREN CRIED. To 11 May.

Leeds

AND ALL THE CHILDREN CRIED
by Judith Jones and Beatrix Campbell, in collaboration with Annie Castledine

West Yorkshire Playhouse, (Courtyard Theatre) To 11 May 2002
Mon-Fri 7.45 (no performance 6 May) Sat 8pm Mats Thur 2.30pm & Sat 4pm
Runs 1hr 30min No interval
(Performance followed by interval and discussion)

TICKETS 0113 213 7700
Review Timothy Ramsden 27 April

Behind this poetic title is a play in part confounded by its own theatricality.Questions of documentary truth and fiction pour from this piece about child abuse and murder. Gail Blackburn is a fictional composite of several case histories. Abused herself, then married to an abuser of her children, she's in prison for protecting her child from further suffering – by killing her.

Finally paroled, she marches off shouldering the burden of her belongings, a mess bundled in her bed-sheet. It's hard not to like Gail, in Gill Wright's performance a middle-aged child who's never had any life of her own. Abused by father then husband – men who've ruled her world - she appeals to her fellow-inmate with wide-eyed willingness, receiving the gift of a personal stereo with a childlike gratitude that culminates in a dance of liberation to Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive.

Across from her lives the obsessively tidy Myra, who keeps her few belongings under a pillow and wipes away any speck Gail's visit might have left. Myra is Myra Hindley, 40 years in prison for her part in the Moors Murders serial killings.

She knows she'll never be released. Gail blames women; Myra men. In aligning herself with someone who'd give her passion and power to escape 1950s dullness, she chose the wrong man. Does this, in Sharon Maugham's impeccably disdainful, straight-backed characterisation, represent the authors' (Jones is a social worker, Campbell a journalist) interpretation of the living Hindley?

And is there a sign of hope in the production changing the closing music from Dido's death-lament (as in the script) to the comparative warmth of Saint-Saens' Softly Awakes My Heart?

A pity the script's workshopping at West Yorkshire Playhouse didn't hone it to something more concentrated. Video is tempting in modern theatre (especially at this theatre) but, together with naturalistic prison-door clangs and male voice-over judgments, plus the religiosity of an upstage Virgin with child and cruciform stage, it elaborates without revealing. I repeatedly longed for precise Pinter or Beckett like minimalism to increase focus.

Yet Annie Castledine obtains scrupulous performances from her actors, in a script which at best is starkly elegant, but elsewhere concedes to unnecessary incidental realism.

Myra: Sharon Maughan
Gail: Gill Wright
Sound/Video contributions: Susie Baxter, Alan Cowan, Sue McCormick, Gail McIntyre, Robert Pickavance

Director: Annie Castledine
Designer: Liz Cooke
Lighting: Nick Beadle
Sound: Glen Massam
Video: The Walnut Partnership
Voice Coach: Charmian Hoare

2002-04-28 13:36:58