COMFORT ME WITH APPLES. To 31 March.
London/Tour.
COMFORT ME WITH APPLES
by Nell Leyshon.
Hampstead Theatre To 27 January then tour to 31 March 2007.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm.
Runs 2hr One interval.
TICKETS: 020 7722 9301.
www.hampsteadtheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 22 January.
A rural dystopia going round the country.
Here’s a play to undo the impact of the gorgeously-photographed landscapes designed to tempt London’s tube-travellers to holidays in peaceful surrounds. Rural England here is muddy, brown and rotting, be it the cider-press, the apples or the farming family itself. Few plays can be so overlaid by the consequences of the past, continual revelations, and the hermetic isolation of agricultural life.
It begins with physical disarray, though the cause for the upturned chairs and broken crockery only emerges well into the second act. There’s unease and discomfort right across Mike Britton’s set, with its earth-covered floor for interior and outside, rotting apples, small window, plus table, chairs and bed spaced non-naturistically and contributing to the cold, unwelcoming mood.
They echo the play’s enclosed, hostile relationships. The farm’s slipping inevitably into the control of the Bank and an overdraft facility. But unlike its Russian cherry-bearing ancestor, this apple orchard has never been a thing of ornament, and has long since stopped being of use. Types of apples, listed with expertise, are reduced to these rotting remnants; an apple given by matriarch Irene to her slow-minded brother Len is used to trick him.
Decay works away, too, inside characters. Len’s never been mentally ripe, while Irene’s nursing a long-held grudge against a neighbour, one that’s kept her son Roy from coming to happy fruition. And Roy, moving unfulfilled through adulthood, is the type who needs pruning and grafting to give flavour and shape to his existence.
Jonathan McGuiness gives Roy a sullen self-awareness, while Veronica Roberts is obstinate truculence personified. There’s no weak link in Lucy Bailey’s cast, and her production gives a fine appearance of slow-moving rural stolidity, though it actually has a faster underlying pace than seems to be the case.
Only Penny Layden’s Brenda, the daughter whose escape from this world is signalled in her smart business clothing, so unfit for farm-work, has the energy to resist. In all, Comfort provides a discomforting view of an unforgiving, unrelenting country existence where financial impoverishment intensifies the gloom of a fixed, brooding mentality exercising unyielding power in an isolated, defeated home.
Irene: Veronica Roberts.
Len: Graham Turner.
Roy: Jonathan McGuinness.
Brenda: Penny Layden.
Linda: Lisa Stevenson.
Director: Lucy Bailey.
Designer: Mike Britton.
Lighting: Oliver Fenwick.
Sound/Music: Nell Catchpole.
Voice/Dialect coach: Janie van Hool.
Fight director: Terry King.
Assistant director: Dan Ayling.
2007-01-25 12:53:33