MAGPIE PARK. To 8 June.

Leeds

MAGPIE PARK
by Oliver Emanuel

West Yorkshire Playhouse (Courtyard Theatre) In rep to 8 June 2007
29-30 May, 2, 4, 7-8 June 7.45pm Mat 2 June 2.30pm
Audio-described/BSL Signed 8 June
Runs 1hr 15min No interval

TICKETS: 0113 213 7700
www.wyp.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 May

Delicate drama suffers from its staging.
It’s grim up Northern Exposure alright. Second play in this year’s trio and second violent death. It’s enough to drive anyone to drink (coincidentally the subject of play 3, Jodie Marshall’s Tender Dearly). Meanwhile Oliver Emanuel takes the subject of a dead woman Laura, exploring her through her lover and sister.

She and Douglas met at work, in the department store where he was store-detective and she a shoplifter (well, it is known as Harvey Nicks). An impulsive moment turned an arrest into a date and a relationship. For her sister Poppy, memories are mainly of childhood and Malcolm the Magpie, which they jointly tended in the local park.

The search for Laura through relationships based in child and adulthoods and the elucidation of physical clues shapes Emanuel’s play. It benefits from two apt performances, Liam McKenna having the right colourless quality for someone who passes unnoticed among shoppers, Alison Pargeter bringing a finely-judged sense of dialogue rhythm and emphasis to Poppy. Repeatedly, points that might have passed for little are given a phrasing expressive of thought or feeling.

Emanuel places the audience in something of the characters’ situation; though we come to know the unseen Laura through the impact she had impact on Douglas and Poppy. It’s a good stage image, this absence, making her intriguing, setting her impact on the pair of characters at the centre.

Less successful is the traverse staging, with a bank of audience either side. Like 3-sided thrust or theatre-in-the-round, traverse staging has many virtues. But none of these forms is helpful to a solo performance. And the first stretch of Magpie Park is effectively a double-soliloquy, with the characters splitting the narrative.

Even when they meet up, the technical need to be paying attention to audience members in opposite directions loses intimacy and directness. Just as you’re straining to hear an actor faced away from you, they turn full-force your way; or, in reverse, mid-speech there’s a sudden disconnection as they turn away. It’s near fatal in a play focussed on details of a relationship uncovering the past. Maybe Magpie Park needs relocating.

Douglas: Liam McKenna
Poppy: Alison Pargeter

Director: Sam Brown
Designer: Barney George
Lighting: David Bennion-Pedley
Sound: Mathew Angove
Composers: Daniel Norton, Emily Norton

2007-06-02 13:23:20