MIDDEN. To 10 June.
Oldham
MIDDEN
by Morna Regan
Coliseum Theatre To 10 June 2006
Tue-thu: Sat 7.30pm Fri 8pm Mat 3, 7 10 June 2.30pm
Audio-described/BSL Signed 8 June
Runs 2hr 25min One interval
TICKETS: 0161 624 2829
www.coliseum.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 May
New drama with the power of Greek tragedy, in an exemplary production.
Oldham's Coliseum has recently reserved the May/June slot for a family show, like The Wizard of Oz or Wind in the Willows. This year there's a family show in a different sense. Morna Regan puts 3 female generations of a Derry househld on stage in their kitchen. And the knives are out. Ruth's back home after 15 years in the States developing a dress-design business with her Derry near-neighbour Mabs. What drove the young businesswomen out wasn't the Troubles, but tensions within the home. Grandmother Dophie, once a dressmaker herself, wouldn't let her have the money to start the firm back home.
Dophie now mixes doolallee moments with shrewd clarity, so for long it's difficult to say, but the bar might have been the middle generation, in the form of Ma. She, unnamed, covers her secrecy with meat-and-2-veg normality for Ruth's arrival.
In exploring the truth, Regan reveals each person's motives years ago. Everyone can have their own agenda in a family situation, creating different priorities rather than objective rights and wrongs. Mother's concerns ran with the now-departed male family members and if she was wrong, there's evidence she's suffered more than anyone else.
This is that rarity, a new play from a beginner playwright that comes fully-formed and sure in characterisation, dialogue and shaping. If Regan turns out someone who has staying-power as a playwright, she will no doubt look back ruefully in 3 or 4 plays' time at the structural decision to follow beautifully-devised extended scenes with a series of shorter ones, as if stagecraft were giving way to televisual thinking. She may consider that, convincingly motivated as her revelations about the past are, they could occasionally gain from a bit more clarity. And she will no doubt be appalled at how comparatively undeveloped Mabs and Aileen are as side-contestants in a 3-corner intergenerational tussle.
But only comparatively. Each character lives in Natalie Wilson's fine production, on Emma Donovan's apt set, a kitchen still with old equipment, that's had a freshening lick of paint covering over the past. Ruth's arrival home, struggling through a window signals the unexpected events and struggles to follow. Wilson achieves a match between realistic activity - cooking, stitching - sudden reactions to Dophie's risky activities and developing relationships. Though there's a rift between the natural and stage Irish speakers (the former have less need to impose a deliberate accent, and so more springily natural rhythms), casting the sympathetic Gemma Craven as Ma keeps the character from a more predictable ramrod-minded, unspeakingly suffering character.
Valerie Lilley's Dophie slides between the clarity of reality and of her memories with clear-edged economy, blunt yet moving, while Melanie McHugh is splendid as Ruth, tenacious, with the exuberance of successful youth yet a determination not to let bygones be gone. For all the surface realism, it's back to Elektra and Clytemnestra in this strong, finely-performed jewel in the Coliseum season.
Ma: Gemma Craven
Mabs: Emma Kearney
Dophie: Valerie Lilley
Ruth: Melanie McHugh
Aileen: Siobhan McSweeney
Director: Natalie Wilson
Designer: Emma Donovan
Lighting: Phil Davies
Sound: Dan Ogden
2006-05-28 16:15:17