BORN IN THE GARDENS. To 11 October.

Tour.

BORN IN THE GARDENS
by Peter Nichols.

Theatre Royal Bath Productions Tour to 11 October 2008.
Runs 2hr 15min One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 11 August at Oxford Playhouse.

Scorching and searching, bitterly humorous and beautifully performed; a treat of a revival.
This play is a kind of obituary. The first act has a dead father in his coffin, as middle-aged stay-at-home Maurice and mother Maud are joined by the children who got away: MP son Hedley and daughter Queenie who lives in California, adopting West Coast aspirations and accent.

From 1979, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, Peter Nichols’ play now becomes a bitter elegy for old Britain. Changing shop names mark out characters’ lives. Nothing works; the colour TV’s ruined and Maurice persuades his mother there’s no sound on the old black-and-white set.

The setting’s Bristol, Nichols’ homeland, and there’s nothing Maud likes so much as getting one over London, usually by gloating with soft sarcasm whenever Bristol scores a point. Maurice keeps his drum-kit in the living-room, pounding to his New Orleans jazz 78s, suitably remote from modern life as he seeks to make his whole existence, maintained by trading volumes of Victorian erotica.

There’s a stubbornness to Maurice and Maud that the confident elegance of the other two (representing politics and America, the ways ahead) can’t pierce. It’s cantankerous and stagnant, as fake as Tudor Manor, their rambling old house, and terminal as a way of life if everyone were like that. But the point of humanity is that people aren’t the same and this old pair are defiantly themselves.

Stephen Unwin’s production catches the sharp wit while letting Nichols’ portrait of a family and a society develop at a well-judged pace. As Miranda Foster and Simon Shepherd move around bringing mere reason into play, Allun Corduner effortlessly shows the mix of selfish defensiveness and near-admirable independence in Maurice.

It’s hard to call Stephanie Cole’s Maud a performance at all. It is, of course, beautifully-judged and executed with care to every minute detail. But as she trundles round the stage, or stares at her TV, mind swapping between past and present, features often busy on the thought following whatever she’s speaking about, it’s as if we were watching old Maud herself, full of life, and retaining in her occasional skipping around a childlike quality that’s never left her.

Maud: Stephanie Cole.
Maurice: Allan Corduner.
Hedley: Simon Shepherd.
Queenie: Miranda Foster.

Director: Stephen Unwin.
Designer: John Gunter.
Lighting: Peter Mumford.
Sound: Gregory Clarke.
Costume: Mark Bouman.
Associate director: Tom Littler.

2008-08-14 00:02:34