DIANA OF DOBSON'S. To 17 March.
London
DIANA OF DOBSON’S
by Cicely Hamilton
Orange Tree Theatre To 17 March 2007
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 4pm & 15, 22 Feb, 1 March
Audio-described 3 March 4pm, 6 March
Post-show discussion Thu mats + 9 March
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
Tickets: 020 8940 3633
www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 February
Another fine Orange Tree rediscovery.
Diana isn’t “of Dobson’s” for long. She’s no sooner seen in the dormitory for the living-in shop-assistants of Dobson’s emporium than an inheritance gives her unimagined, if brief, freedom. It starts with defiance of dormitory-overseer Miss Pringle, making clear how subservience relates to being a wage-slave.
Diana lives it up till the money runs out. Elegantly-dressed, in a smart Swiss hotel, she’s courted by a wealthy chain-store owner and a none–too-wealthy army officer.
Moments in this 1908 play show author Cicely Hamilton knew, or thought along the lines of, Bernard Shaw, cornerstone of this season’s Orange Tree repertory. Diana taunts newly-knighted retail magnate Grinley with being a pleasant equal but doubtless a tyrant as employer, recalling Widowers’ Houses, while Victor’s realisation his Eton schooling hasn't fitted him for employment echoes Man and Superman’s polytechnic-educated chauffeur ‘Enery Straker.
It’s easy to imagine Shaw making a play out of Diana’s challenge to Victor to earn his living for 6 months. Here it’s merely a talk-scene on the Embankment, where a friendly copper offers Victor a bob before all’s happily settled.
Yet Hamilton does something Shaw is unlikely to have managed; she makes Diana a living, impulsive individual, not an expression of living, impulsive ideas.
Her late father was a country doctor, impoverished by tending the poor, but leaving her an intelligence that articulates a middle-class understanding of the power of money which adult experience has shown her. There’s none of the alternative ways of getting-by encountered at Major Barbara’s Salvation Army hostel.
Cate Debenham-Taylor stands out from her fellow counter-jumpers (sympathetically clichéd proletarians) in brightness of appearance and manner as she does in intellectual nimbleness from the Swiss set.
Caroline Smith veers too much towards comedy when in the Alps. Victor is such a dunce it’s hard to see him attracting Diana, though Edward Bennett does well both with awkwardness (see him slump in a hotel chair) and self-realisation.
Yet her production, with a strong Orange Tree cast, mostly puts convincing and attractive flesh on the ideological bones of a play which understands money and the minds of intelligent women.
Miss Smithers: Julie Teal
Kitty Brant: Miriam Hughes
Miss Jay: Charity Reindorp
Diana Massingberd: Cate Debenham-Taylor
Miss Morton: Daisy Ashord
Miss Pringle/Mrs Cantelupe: Lavinia Bertram
Waiter/PC Fellowes: Richard Hollis
Mrs Whyte-Fraser/Old Woman: Debra Penny
Sir Jabez Grinley: Geoff Leesley
Captain Victor Bretherton: Edward Bennett
Director: Caroline Smith
Designer: Jude Stedham
Lighting: John Harris
Assistant director: Henry Bell
2007-02-18 13:01:29