BLACKBIRD. To 9 July.
London/Tour
BLACKBIRD
by Claire Luckham music by David Lyon
Southwark Playhouse To 28 June then tour to 9 July 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 21 June 3pm
Runs 2hr 10min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7620 3494 (Southwark)
admin@southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 June
Some good moments and ideas; interesting score but something's gone badly awry in the mix.'I want you here, with your peonies.' It is possible to build a drama where such a line believably expresses a story, and relationship, at its crisis. But not here. Despite a playwright who has produced some fine work, and a vigorous, experienced director, this new play with songs, far from taking flight, limps along and falls flat on its face.
Michael has died. Rosemary, his lover and manager of his plant nursery, is devastated, especially when widow Fiona turns up to dispose of the place. Until, in a plot-switch line that might end an act, but ill-fits as conclusion to the whole play, the property gets reassigned.
Paul wants to buy the place he's not one for horticulture, but he is a business man. An inept one, given the way he divulges his keenness to buy before a price is settled.
The songs music-theatre rather than musical theatre have a cool astringency and are welcome, but they crop up rarely, semi-detached from the action.
Otherwise it's angst,angst all the way; fraught complaint and intense emotional suffering from unsympathetic people whose feelings rarely acquire a glimmer of reality.
They seem petty, set by the calm discontent of Anatol Yusef's Turkish Kurd asylum seeker, with a gift for plants and a desire for computers. But they're surely intended to have more significance than emerges.
His is the only performance rooted in reality. It's possible to respond to his desire for wealth which could take him from his satisfaction as a fine gardener, but real enough with a family back home to help out - in a way no-one else provokes.
Something certainly seems wrong. Yusef's Sarhad apart, the cast seem uncomfortable: unconvinced as well as unconvincing. Emotions are stated (and over-stated) in isolated pockets; they never seem to connect. Emotional registers are generalised and don't relate.
Whatever they may say to fill us in, there's no sense of characters ever having met, talked or known about each other before. It comes over as playwright's exposition, not lives being lived.
I generally like the work of Claire Luckham, Jane Howell and Southwark Playhouse. Not this time though.
Rosemary: Juliet Alderdice
Sophie: Candida Bensdon
Peter: Neil McCaul
Paul: Ralph Seward
Fiona: Tilly Tremayne
Sarhad: Anatol Yusef
Director: Jane Howell
Designer: Sophie Jump
Lighting: David Plater
Sound: Edith-Marie Pasquier
Musical supervisor: Michael Haslam
Musical Director: Russell Hepplewhite
2003-06-11 06:48:03