CARVER. To 6 August.

London

CARVER
by Raymond Carver adapted by William Gaskill

Arcola Theatre To 6 August 2005
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 3pm
Runs 2hr 30min One interval

TICKETS: 020 7503 1646
www.arcolatheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 July

Fine direction and performances catch big implications around stories' routine events.A physical giant among London Fringe theatres, the Arcola comes into its own with William Gaskill's adaptation of 5 short stories by American writer Raymond Carver, who died in 1988. Carver's survival to 50 was a tribute to resilience against alcohol and nicotine, but he outlived Chekhov, to whom Gaskill compares him.

A layout of kitchen, dining-table and bedroom on the periphery of a central living-room creates the largely domestic placing of Carver's intimate, elusive stories, peopled with ordinary members of mid-society America, house-owners but not high-flyers. An evening on cream soda and cannabis with friends, a secretary bringing her blind employer to meet her husband, a married couple's visit for no good reason to the people whose home they rented for a year, are settings for slices-of-life where frustration and resentment leak to the surface.

Only Fat mainly takes place outside a home, with a waitress fascinated over an outsize customer's chunky fingers. Other staff mock their obese customer at a distance but she brings extra bread, ladles on the sour cream and replaces the touch of molten chocolate he asks for with lashings of the stuff.

Andrew Buckley's corpulent customer is perpetually gasping for breath, referring to himself in the plural, and suggesting a sad compulsion behind the eating. He's contrasted by Annika Boras's fascination as she recalls the non-events from her friend's living-room, moving between table and kitchen as the incident's re-enacted.

There's similar intensity and restraint throughout, though Bruce Alexander's Edgar comes close to explosion as he forces down the offender's literary throat the story of his house wrecked during a tenancy as subject for a story (if Carver wrote from life, several lives he writes are those of authors). Alexander's also in the sustained centre-piece Cathedral where his character overcomes distaste at a blind man entering his home, eventually assisting the visitor to imagine and draw a cathedral.

As husband and employer (Bob and Robert) slowly move together, Rosemary McHale's wife/secretary between, then asleep behind, them, Gaskill shows the vivid physically reality in Carver's stories of the mass of men living lives of quiet desperation.

What's In Alaska?
Jack: Mark Carroll
Mary: Melisande Cook
Helen: Kelli Kerslake
Carl: Paul Albertson

Fat
Waitress: Annika Boras
Fat Man: Andrew Buckley
Rudy: Paul Albertson
Joanne: Melisande Cook
Rita: Kelli Kerslake

Cathedral Man: Bruce Alexander
Wife: Rosemary McHale
Blind Man: Jack Klaff

Put Yourself in My Shoes
Narrator: Andrew Buckley
Myers: Mark Carroll
Paula Myers: Melisande Cook
Edgar Morgan: Bruce Alexander
Hilda Morgan: Rosemary McHale

Intimacy
Man: Jack Klaff
Wife: Kathryn Pogson

Director: William Gaskill
Designer: Jon Bausor
Lighting: Neil Fraser
Sound: Claire Jowett, Leon Marks
Assistant director: James Hammond
Associate designer: Patrick Burnier
Assistant lighting: Jack Williams

2005-07-10 09:40:17