FIVE FINGER EXERCISE: Shaffer: Salisbury Payhouse to 9th March

Salisbury

FIVE FINGER EXERCISE
by Peter Shaffer.

Salisbury Playhouse To 9 March 2002
Runs: 2hr 40 min. One interval

TICKETS 01722 320333
Review Mark Courtice 22 February

Sensitive production makes the case for well written play as modern and intriguing.Walter, a young German, has been taken on to tutor Stanley and Louise’s young daughter and causes havoc as they and their son Clive, provoked by his emotionally glacial attractions, reveal just how ghastly they are during the course of a week end at their country house. He seeks the chance to live in a family better than his own, they see a Tabula Rasa on which they draw their own designs to resolve their problems.

Appearing in 1958, two years after “Look Back in Anger”, this, at first sight, appears a throw-back, being set in the middle-class riding and golfing territory that was anathema to angry young men. However, references here to the kitchen sink and even a discussion about Sunday papers slyly stake this play’s claim to its own modernity.

In fact it is as modern and well written as anything of the time, and feels it in this careful and sensitive production that lets the play get on with its cunning, intriguing stuff. Tim Meacock has designed an “off” country house (furnished with baronial oak uncomfortably mixed with Louis XV), spread-eagled so that the whole of Salisbury’s large stage can be used. Often exchanges are held across this wide space, a trick which makes the moments when people do come together even more powerful. It’s cold; with very small fires, and spectral bare Suffolk tree branches appearing at the edges of the set, mirroring the desolate hearts within. Dan Jones’ clashing scene-change music does not provide any semblance of comfort.

Shaffer creates star parts, and although not as cracking as Mozart, Louise is the next best thing and is seized on by Jenny Quayle in a performance full of splendid self centredness and self deception. Martin Hutson makes Walter attractive enough for us to understand his power, but cannot do anything about the fact that for reasons of dramatic construction he can have no deeper emotional life. Oliver Dimsdale invests the mixed up Clive with real confusion and pathos, and Richard Heffer convinces us that there is more to Stanley that just an insensitive upper lip.

Stanley: Richard Heffer
Louise: Jenny Quayle
Clive: Oliver Dimsdale
Pamela: Jo Theaker
Walter: Martin Hutson

Director: Dominic Hill
Design: Tim Meacock
Lighting: Peter Hunter
Sound: Diane Prentice
Original Music: Dan Jones

2002-02-25 20:27:27