HELLO AND GOODBYE. To 17 May.

London.

HELLO AND GOODBYE
by Athol Fugard.

Trafalgar Studios (Studio 2) To 17 May 2008.
Mom-Sat 7.45pm Mat Thu & Sat 3pm.
Runs 2hr One interval.

TICKETS: 0870 060 6632.
www.theambassadors.com/trafalgarstudios
Review: Timothy Ramsden 29 April.

Messed-up lives given vivid clarity.
This production is a mess. How much of a mess only emerges in the second act when the main room in the shanty-home where brother and sister Johnny and Hester Smit slug out their existence during her brief visit home is crowded with the contents of cardboard boxes in which their past has been stored. Hester’s searching for her share of their father’s only wealth - compensation money for loss of a leg in an industrial accident years before.

Money apart, all Hester wants is her long-dead mother’s dress as a souvenir of the only parent she loved; her keen smelling of its odour is the play’s only moment of affection. Johnny, meanwhile, closely guards his father, whose state only becomes clear near the end.

But the physical chaos is nothing like that inside the siblings’ heads. The real legacy messing-up their lives is the paternal authority derived from religion, to which Johnny clings and which Hester denies. He’s tied down by it, she’s left rudderless without it.

Athol Fugard’s 1965 play shows him as concerned with South Africa’s poor White population as he is about the human harms of apartheid.

With cheaply-styled hair, over made-up face and shabbily glamorous dress, Saskia Reeves’ Hester is someone who would be the girl at the end of the bar in some American noir, knowing her body is her only asset, sold lovelessly often enough, and keeping her sense of self in another compartment of life..

But, lugging her suitcase in and out, pacing the room anxiously, opening those boxes full of family detritus, she is at least still trying.

Rafe Spall’s Johnny, tapping out the seconds on a glass, literally losing count of time, makes his sister seem a picture of balance and purpose. Spall fizzes into an ever-tighter spiral of introversion, giving Johnny’s prestissimo verbal riffs an interior logic.

Designer Libby Watson has done a detailed job evoking the colour-drained poverty and decay of this home, where there were never enough rooms. Paul Robinson’s production steers clearly through the tangle, making sense of the anguish and imbalance in two over-freighted lives.

Hester: Saskia Reeves.
Johnny: Rafe Spall.

Director: Paul Robinson.
Designer: Libby Watson.
Lighting: Johanna Town.
Sound/Music: Richard Hammarton.
Dialect coach: Mary Howland.
Assistant director: Charlotte Bennett.

2008-05-01 17:51:50