NOTHING. To 20 December.
Glasgow
NOTHING
by Henry Green adapted by Andrea Hart
Citizens'Theatre Circle Studio To 20 December 2004
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat 13 December 3pm
Runs 1hr 45min One interval
TICKETS: 0141 429 0022
www.citz.co.uuk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 29 November
Small world and a sterile one made theatrically vivid.If the characters in Henry Green's 1952 novel ever went to the theatre, they'd have found plays about the dilemmas of people like themselves. Yet Robert David MacDonald's witty account of Andrea Hart's adaptation shows how small and ultimately insignificant these people are on the face of the earth.
They move from corner to corner, sitting at white-clothed restaurant tables, drinking wine, pettily insisting on preferential treatment as regulars. Or discuss and dissect each other. They mate and wish they hadn't. They can't be sure whether the new generation are half-siblings or not.
As their vacuity ricochets down a generation, the rottenness rides through the imagery, in talk of severed limbs and chronic illness. And the literal props of social life are gradually removed as the roof creaks, cracking to shower another handful of dust upon the floor.
It's a monochrome affair, the tight in-the-round space becoming marvellously apt as gossiping pairs sit in the corners for the fast passing scenes. When they come home it's to two neutral, black sofas, back-to-back in the centre. Presumptuously assertive (crowding the actors into spaces as restricted as their little world), yet blandly uniform, these sofas reduce to one after the interval.
Tablecloths, then tables, are removed: as the externals disappear the stage's emptiness mirrors these people's lives. An obvious-sounding point, but given force by the playing, which only occasionally verges on parody. Simon Dutton's authoritative looking John, Lorna McDevitt as the eternal sympathiser who has no known life of her own, Derwent Watson as the gossipy Richard the type who's always there but no-one knows why the assertiveness of Mary and Philip, still announced in less sophisticated cadences; all build a vividly sterile world that leaves its glamorous protagonists emotionally shipwrecked, ending in a worn-out, mutual heap amid a void that finally makes explicit the title's significance.
Ironic that MacDonald, prolific translator from languages round Europe, ends his long Citizens' stint with so quintessentially English a piece. Yet it's a fine final work, showing the compact, confident boldness MacDonald and his two director colleagues have done so much to create.
John Pomfret: Simon Dutton
Mary Pomfret: Candida Benson
Jane Wetherby: Sophie Ward
Philip Wetherby: Pete Ashmore
Liz Jennings: Lorna McDevitt
Richard Abbot: Derwent Watson
Waiter: Bob Rafferty
Director: Robert David MacDonald
Designer: Annie Curtis Jones
Lighting: Paul Sorley
2003-12-04 09:27:18