BEDTIME STORY/THE END OF THE BEGINNING. To 1 April.
London
BEDTIME STORY/THE END OF THE BEGINNING
by Sean O’Casey
Union Theatre 204 Union Street SE1 To 1 April 2006
Tue-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 2hr One interval
TICKETS: 020 7928 6363 (Mon-Fri 10am-2pm, in advance)
020 7261 9876 (on the day)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 March
Rare chance to see O’Casey in comic mode, in an adventurous, if not wholly apt staging.
Union Street, where Sasha Regan’s enterprising theatre nestles under a railway arch, is a continuation eastwards of The Cut, where the Young Vic is undergoing a major rebuild. So it’s almost a home-from-home for the Vic’s Direct Action programme, aimed at developing new directors.
Tiffany Watt-Smith presents comic one-acters by the Irish playwright usually associated with Dublin tenements during Ireland’s struggle for independence. The battle in these pieces, one darkly humorous, one outright farcical, is between men and women. The men come off worst both times.
Two kinds of masculine delusion come a cropper. In the first play (a somewhat-after-most-people’s-bedtime story, set at 4am) a pious youth falls easy prey to a streetwise woman’s schemes to trick him of all he has as she exploits his naivety and post-coital fear of someone finding her in his room. Angela Nightingale, given a soft-and-hard fluidity by Elaine Symons, easily calculates the responses of Michael Colgan’s slow-witted, unworldly Mulligan.
In the second play a slob of a husband boastingly swaps his work in the fields for his wife’s supposedly easier domestic routine. After comic displays of keep-fit vanity and the time-wasting rehearsal of a double-act risque song with his friend, Darry gets down to cleaning-up and feeding the livestock. Donning his wife’s pinafore, he takes on her manner too, complaining about his friend’s clumsiness. It might be nice to have someone else to blame for once, but things have barely begun going wrong before they spiral into chaos.
Watt-Smith, eagerly abetted by playful designer Lizzie Clachan, treats both pieces with overt theatricality, initially taking the audience round behind the scenes before admitting them to the auditorium. This fits Bedtime Story’s night-time secrecy, as does the narrowing perspective to a cramped corner where John Jo stashes his possessions. It allows a fitting finale as he cowers there himself, exposed in his night’s shameful lapse.
A few delicious moments apart (including a flying heifer), the opened-up stage for the second play, in its overt, rehearsal-studio artificiality, is top-heavy with invention at the expense of the sense of spontaneity needed for the farce-like second play.
Bedtime Story
John Jo Mulligan: Míchael Colgan
Angela Nightingale : Elaine Symons
Daniel Halibut: Jean-Paul Van Cauwelaert
Miss Mossie :Nora Connelly
The End of the Beginning
Darry Berrill: David Ganly
Lizzie Berrill: Nora Connolly
Barry Derrill: Jean-Paul Van Cauwelaert
Director: Tiffany Watt-Smith
Designer: Lizzie Clachan
Lighting: Mischa Twitchin
Sound/Music: Chris Branch, Tom Haines
Assistant director: Aoife Smyth
Design Assistant: Gary Campbell
2006-03-29 08:46:11