MOTHERLAND To 7 November.

London.

MOTHERLAND
by Steve Gilroy.

Tristan Bates Theatre 1a Tower Street WC2H 9NP To 7 November 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm.
Runs 1hr 50min One interval.

TICKETS: 020 7240 6283.
www.tristanvatestheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 October.

From the fog of war clarity about its impact back home.
From Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Live Theatre (with The Empty Space) Steve Gilroy’s script and production reach London. Source of Lee Hall’s The Pitman Painters and a Deep Cut drama, Live speaks for the region’s people.

Or, in this case, lets them speak for themselves. Verbatim pieces can be manipulative, a dramatist’s shortcut substituting cut-and-paste editorialising for imaginative creation. And they co-exist on two levels: real-world speech and the theatrical adoption of it by actors (in Motherland, considerable younger than some of the people they portray), giving even speech tones and rhythms copied from tapes a different sensibility.

Yet there’s every sense the words and the women here are direct from homes around Tyne and Wear. There’s a taut restraint to the four actors playing the mothers and lovers whose offspring and partners have died in Iraq or Afghanistan. There's remendous variety too, producing several dramatic moments. Like Sunderland’s Janice (each woman’s identified on first appearance), whose first long account of her unemployed son ends with his delight at being finally accepted by the army (“Mam, I’m gonna have a life”), before she returns to catalogue the series of reports she received of his dismemberment.

Once, these women’s bereavement would have come from a mining disaster or shipyard accident. Now, enemy explosives are compounded by inadequate body and vehicle armouring.

Every line packs in human experience, the trivial given significance by later events, amid a stage littered with empty ammunition boxes. Occasionally a performer characterises someone with an evidently reproduced aspect of speech. But what surprises is the way the women seem to have assimilated bereavement into their lives, speaking around their grief or anger.

Pleasant if hardly intellectual Nikki, mother and daughter Elizabeth and Deborah, verbally inextricable, and the others are all given dignified individuality. Gilroy keeps wider theatricality to the edges: the sound mix of aeroplane and rattling tea-cups to open, an extract from one of the women on a tape-recorder merging into an actor’s speech, then video footage of men marching plus a sudden montage of the women’s words, as if the sight had brought emotions flooding to the surface.

Isabel/Janice/Gemma: Rachel Adamson.
Elizabeth/Carol/Nikki/Maria: Charlie Binns.
Suzie/Elsie/Joanne 2/Sarah/Maggie: Eleanor Clarke.
Deborah/Joanne 1/Jane/Pat: Helen Embleton.

Director: Steve Gilroy.
Designer: Gary McCann.
Lighting: Drummond Orr.
Sound: Martin Hodgson.
Composer: Richard Dawson.
AV Designer: Taryn Edmonds.
Movement: Kate Craddock.
Costume: Lou Duffy.

2009-10-27 12:25:54