CUCKOO TEAPOT. To 10 May.
Tour.
CUCKOO TEAPOT
by Kate Griffin.
Eastern Angles Tour to 10 May 2008.
Runs 2hr 5min One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 March at Walsham-Le-Willows Village Hall.
Story of migrant workers in a Victorian sex-and-death corset.
Back from the brink of funding disaster, Eastern Angles open-up another strand of regional history: the seasonal migrations, a century or so back, of Norfolk and Suffolk labourers to Staffordshire’s Burton-upon-Trent to work in the town’s 27 breweries.
With their strange accents the ‘Norkies’, as Burton folk termed them, were unwelcome temporary residents, despite coming to fulfil a function in the town’s main industry. Fights often broke out and, less explicably, the Norkies returned home from the home of brewing with a teapot as present for their mothers.
There’s plenty to mash together here, with some clear modern resonances. Culture clashes, the unwelcome alien and their impact on a community. Making a temporary life in a hostile environment, the individual out of their community. All these are suggested in the programme notes, but Kate Griffin’s script touches only lightly on them, preferring a conventional story that might derive from one of the period’s social novels.
There’s the dead parent and orphaned offspring; the oppressed hero with a shining soul, the respectable-seeming hypocrite who wields power over and sexually threatens a young woman, the forcefully moralistic respectable working women, the dead parents whose pasts hold the key to events.
Everything’s predictable; religion is allowed a brief affirmation before being undercut by modern liberal hindsight. Time’s spent setting-up the situation, before sudden whirls of action towards the end. Suffragettes are mentioned in the closing minutes, with no idea how young Emily’s keenness for the vote will impact on her relationship with traditional-seeming Joseph.
The reference becomes merely another element in the tepid liberal-consensus pot this play never challenges. And Griffin’s dialogue tends to be over-explicit, not trusting director and actors to make a point. It happens with her explanation of the title, and elsewhere.
More work’s really needed on a script that awkwardly wanders round an intriguing situation. It’s acted efficiently on a set ingeniously cramped into village hall spaces, designer Charlie Cridlan’s abstract sloping roof-shapes suggesting industrial buildings and young Emily’s fixed bicycle giving a repeated sense of urgency as lovers evade their elders’ machinations. But that’s no new story, either.
Joseph: Tim Bell.
Emily: Bryony Harding.
Rose: Jacqueline Redgewell.
Mr Spencer/Charlie: Graham Howes.
Nancy: Helen Grady.
Director: Ivan Cutting.
Designer: Charlie Cridlan.
Lighting: Steve Cooney.
Music: Pat Whymark.
2008-03-11 00:42:41