CAPTAIN OATES' LEFT SOCK. To 31 January.
London.
CAPTAIN OATES’ LEFT SOCK
by John Antrobus.
Finborough Theatre above The Finborough Brasserie 118 Finborough Road SW10 9ED To 31 January 2009.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat & Sun 3pm.
Runs 2hr 10min One interval.
TICKETS: 0845 847 1652 (24hr no booking fee).
www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk (no booking fee; reduced full-price tickets online).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 11 January.
Play, if not sock, hung out to dry by time and production.
Another Finborough rediscovery from a generation or two back, Captain Oates was freshly innovative when it first surfaced at new play hothouse the Royal Court in 1973.
In a firm but gentler vein it touches on questions of how we regard the supposedly insane that were made famous by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, while a similar question’s posed to one surrounding Joe Orton’s slightly earlier medicine and madness farce What the Butler Saw: who is more lunatic, the man who harmlessly insists he’s a poached egg or the super-sane pilot who drops a nuclear bomb on civilians?
In days when NHS orthodoxy meant pills and electric shocks, and only innovators tried group therapy, creating an alternative little society to ones which, as R D Laing was suggesting, created their own madness, it was a left-field approach to show a doctor agonising over the method, against his more orthodox male Nurse. And a natural ending that everyone ends up shifting to freedom in the country.
It’s an end relying on a young patient coming from a farming family and putting a barn at everyone’s disposal. Nowadays, that sounds dangerously like going private Nowadays, when the NHS is something to cherish and protect, not to attack, and when group therapy has become the object of middle-class sitcom jokes.
We might be encouraged to suspend chronological disbelief and enter back into those times if this new production caught more of the Napoleon XII anarchy of the times. While there are some touching creations among those who suffer, or exist, in silence or near silence, there’s little outside the chief rebel to give a sense of the way things were.
Designer Ruth Hall makes the best point. The Finborough is stripped to the walls, around which a single row of seats joins characters and spectators in a circle. Their colour coding separates ‘us’ from ‘them’ - until a late point when the separation allows a startling surprise moment.
Curtains cover most of the theatre’s windows; just one allows a view of the outside world. It’s in this layout the revival speaks clearest.
Dr Parks: Tom Marshall.
Carter: David Hinton.
Molly Topps: Janie Booth.
David: Richard Atwill.
Celia: Kate Lock.
Juliet: Sally Tatum.
Nurse Bryant: Kathy Rose O'Brien.
Margaret: Louise Bush.
Nurse Rogers: Gareth Clarke.
The Colonel: Walter Hall.
Dorothy: Pascale Burgess.
Fergy: Lloyd Woolf.
William: Kane Anderson.
Rose: Hannah Bridges.
A Newcomer: Rhian Green.
Director: Russell Bolam.
Designer: Ruth Hall.
Lighting: Katharine Williams.
Movement: Daniela Forbes.
2009-01-14 11:23:59