BENEFACTORS. To 28 September.
London
BENEFACTORS
by Michael Frayn
Albery Theatre To 28 September 2002
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu 2.30pm & Sat 3.30pm
Runs 2hr 20min One interval
TICKETS 020 7369 1740
Review Timothy Ramsden 26 June 2002
A solid silver revival of a play interesting in itself, as well as being a period reminder.
'Can't do right for doing wrong,' as my mother used to say faced with childhood truculence. It's a problem for Frayn's 1984 quartet, two married couples charted from the sixties to the then present-day. Fast-rising architect David seems well-balanced with confident wife Jane, while old pals Colin and Sheila live in a descending miasma of ill-sorted domestic tyranny and fear.
Or so it seems. But, just as David's vision of a renewed inner-city development gradually crumbles into high-rise hell, his charitable taking-on of Sheila as dogsbody employee helps her out from under the uncertainty of Colin's wing – unpredictably stroking or beating as it is.
And friendship curdles with Colin uses his uncertain place in journalism to snipe publicly at David, while privately he's moving in on Jane.
The society backing Frayn's action is now a world away, with – of course – plus ca changing. Most unlikely in 2002 is the middle-class mouse Sheila, though there are domestic bullies like Colin around. If they do less damage, it's probably because the next generation was growing up less likely to marry, or feel a traditional pull to stay married and suffer.
Fascinating in depicting a social group unaware that Thatcherism was hitting them, along with other contemporary trends – not least the way women were seen and saw themselves – Benefactors is also surprising in how little dialogue it uses. In Kennedy's Children, Robert Patrick had established the intercut monologue as a dramatic form in the previous decade, and Peter Nichols had developed a structure with one character's direct-to-audience address linking realistic scenes.
But Frayn, whose popularity may well have masked his experimentalism, has all four characters talking to the audience, and with a frequency that makes dialogue scenes appear like dramatic reconstructions supporting one character's view of history. No wonder he was later attracted to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
Aden Gillett's David is efficient but generalised; the other trio are fine, Neil Pearson steering between over-cuddly nastiness and open brutality, Sylvestra Le Touzel giving Jane real depth. Set and lighting do little to focus attention or create mood. But the play remains a thing well worth seeing.
Jane: Sylvestra Le Touzel
David: Aden Gillett
Colin: Neil Pearson
Sheila: Emma Chambers
Director: Jeremy Sams
Designer: Robert Jones
Lighting: Tim Mitchell
Sound John Leonard for Aura
2002-07-04 13:36:56