GLASS EELS. To 21 July.
London
GLASS EELS
by Nell Leyshon
Hampstead Theatre To 21 July 2007
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm & 11 July 2.30pm
Audio-described 14 July 3pm
Captioned 17 July
Post-show discussion 17 July
Runs 1hr 35min No interval
TICKETS: 020 7722 9301
www.hampsteadtheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 July
Lovely to look at, a poem of lives haunted by memory.
Nell Leyshon’s unlikely to win a West of England tourist award. After Comfort Me With Apples, here’s another drama of depressing rurality (it dipped its toe in the region with three performances at Taunton Brewhouse), set in “a land of water and silt and mud and eels.”
Teenage Lily learns a lot about them from granddad Harold, and so do we. The creatures’ proclivity to return to the mud, to twist and coil, reflects the characters’ lives, bounded by memories of Lily’s dead mother, led by emotional drives and frustrated searches for freedom, something they’re as willing to deny others as seek for themselves.
Pursuing, taunting 32-year old Kenneth, Lily is silvery and slippery as an eel. Laura Elphinstone shows her youthful emotional certainty and angered awkwardness when challenged.
Leyshon’s action is as circular as her chief symbol; this is theatre poetry, meditative and lyrical even when discordant, balancing youthful desire with the frustration of middle-age – Mervyn is obsessed with removing a fly from its “coffin” of a window-pane - and grandfather Harold’s physical appetite. For him the biggest tragedy must be the breadboard getting smashed.
Tom Georgeson climactic moments suggest a Harold who’s more influential than the character seems to be; outside these moments he captures the granddad’s mix of memory and diurnal activity as if he’s been living this life for years. Phillip Joseph is outstanding as Mervyn, trying to find a new life with Julie and look after his daughter while still locked in by the past. Hope, anger and unspoken frustration are intertwined in his taciturn, deliberate manner.
All the cast’s good. But the greatest impression comes from the mix of Mike Britton’s set and Nell Catchpole’s lighting. Comparatively bright room-lighting is the exception, isolated pools of it contrasting the moonlit river, with an abstract roof, a mix of reflection and gaps, looming at an angle over the stage.
Gradually, as in Bailey’s Manchester Dream and Twelfth Night water covers the floor, surrounding the characters’ ankles. Like the play, it creates a stasis that both illumines and pins-down the characters as part of the melancholy mood.
Julie: Diane Beck
Kenneth: Tom Burke
Lily: Laura Elphinstone
Harold: Tom Georgeson
Mervyn: Phillip Joseph
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: Noah Birksted-Breen
2007-07-10 12:12:32