CHRISTINE. To 10 September.

London

CHRISTINE
by Dirk De Villiers

New End Theatre To 10 September 2006
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sat & Sun 3.30pm
Runs 2hr One interval

TICKETS: 0870 033 2733
www.newendtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 20 August

Sisters-under-the-skin drama needs radical surgery.
Apartheid became unbearable for author Dirk De Villiers as far back as the 1960s, when he moved from South Africa to England. It’s strange that, personal exorcism apart, this play should reach the stage in 2006. It has nothing new to say about a country where the issues are now very different, and is hardly likely to be an effective reminder of the bad old days.

Issues don’t make a play and the big secret revealed as Act I ends is insufficiently worked out in terms of the characters as De Villiers engineers subsequent sensation situations - reduced in impact by the frame of a hearing at the post-apartheid era Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Technically, this is the kind of play a moderately capable teenager might write. Rarely does anything so clumsy reach the professional stage. This is a play where a White woman, Kay, tells her Black maid Christine to tidy up a room then returns 10 seconds later to ask if it’s been done.

Or where daughter Sally’s boyfriend calls, only to say straightaway he has to leave, before ringing-up minutes later. In fact, the shortish scenes are full of the doorbell ringing, with people arriving to announce their departure. And no-one would expect a character in a play today to repeat the other side of a ‘phone conversation; how many decades is it since Stoppard parodied that in The Real Inspector Hound?

Nobody ever says anything unless it’s to illustrate a thematic point. And when it’s necessary for the reactionary Myra to discover characters in an apparently compromising position, she uses the shortcut between 2 rooms, despite, like everyone else, having used the longer route on each previous occasion the journey’s been made (quite a few times – the second act’s invalid has a near-constant changing of the guard among her watchers. Some have hardly sat down before they’re up again, summoned by dramatic necessity).

The actors seem to be working to mitigate all this. The direction is either tactful or invisible according to taste. But really, this is incompetent playwriting and it just won’t do.

Philip Keebler: Robin Samson
Kay Keebler: Kate Best
Christine Hamelin: Rosalyn Wright
Myra Warden: Lindsay Mohun
Sally Keebler: Emily Bowman
Andrew Pullman: Peter Defeo

Director: John-Jackson Almond
Designer: Charlotte Damigos
Lighting: Mike Robertson
Sound/Music: Tom Kirkpatrick
Video/Film: Elliott Tucker
Voice/Accent coach: Martin McKellan
Assistant designer: Carly French

2006-08-21 01:05:41