INSIGNIFICANCE. To 9 April.
Cambridge
INSIGNIFICANCE
by Terry Johnson
Arts Theatre To 9 April 2005
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 15min One interval
TICKETS: 01223 503333
www.cambridgeartsrtheatre.com (£1 booking fee on all tickets, however booked)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 April
Strong and sympathetic revival of a play that dazzles and involves.We name names: the originals of the quartet meeting in a hotel bedroom one night in 1953 are anti-communist tribunal chair Joseph McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe, her baseball-star first husband Joe Di Maggio and Albert Einstein. They were all in New York at the time, which was enough to set playwright Terry Johnson's imagination going. Though he doesn't stick to real-life biography, his Insignificance, essentially, is full of movers and shakers.
Yet these celebrities deplore their own or others' significance. The actress struggles to understand Relativity while sick of her fame. The Senator's practicality has no place for ideas. And Johnson's caught them as they're slipping over the edge Di Maggio's' playing years are past, the Actress keeps being told she looks 6 years older than the real' Monroe, McCarthy' knows his UnAmerican tribunal activities are near their credibility's end, while Einstein's' stuck with his latest formulae.
Amid this, it's human sympathy between Actress and Professor that points them forward. A quote from a play he's seen leads her to dramatist Arthur Miller (in time her second husband) as her first marriage is fading, while a chance comment from her jolts his imagination ahead, in a theatrical coup, to the possibilities of new insecurity that would arrive with the death-dealing, property-preserving neutron bomb much talked of around the play's 1983 premiere.
Samuel West's Sheffield production, ending a short tour in Cambridge, is as good as we're likely to see. Mary Stockley's penetrating portrait, especially, resolves the problem of creating a private identity for Monroe' without undercutting the public iconography. And Nicholas Le Prevost gets laughs out of slight flickers of response this is a world where the wise know there's often little to be said while going deeper than the bumbling academic image in showing concern for big issues and little details involving those around.
With Gerard Horan reigning in the Senator's nastiness to make the brutality of power - co-theme with imagination - explicable (though still brutal) and Patrick O' Kane's baseball-player changing gear smoothly from inarticulate violence to quieter consideration, Johnson's play of power and imagination comes forcefully across.
The Professor: Nicholas Le Prevost
The Senator: Gerard Horan
The Actress: Mary Stockley
The Ballplayer: Patrick O' Kane
Heavy: Robert Lockhart
Director: Samuel West
Designer: Tom Piper
Lighting: Neil Austin
Sound: Gregory Clarke
Dialect coach: Julia Wilson-Dickson
Fight director: Terry King
Assistant director: Maria Pattinson
2005-04-07 10:11:15