OFFICE SUITE.
Chichester
OFFICE SUITE
by Alan Bennett
Minerva Theatre To 12 May
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat 25 April, 2, 10 May 2.15pm
Audio-described 27 April, 28 April 2.15pm
Runs 2hr 20min One interval
TICKETS: 01243 781312
www.cft.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden
Crack cast provide sad laughter in Bennett double.
There’s working, and there’s going to work. And there’s the work that gets done when you don’t go to work. Mr Dodsworth’s recently retired after 30 years at north-country company Warburtons. But when former colleague Miss Prothero calls with office news, he’s unsettled to realise how transient the impact of those years has been
These one-act plays, originally broadcast on TV in 1978, suggest computers beginning to work wonders of timing and organisation. But the second, office-bound, drama reminds that bureaucracy still meant mounds of paper passing from floor to floor in hope of something eventually happening somewhere.
Like Alan Ayckbourn, Bennett captures the decade’s terminal middle-class defeatism, while Green Forms presciently implies the imminent future of Thatcherism’s harsher purposefulness. Bennett’s twosome are cuddly toys impregnated with acid. Dodsworth and Prothero, or Doreen and Doris, appear friendly but underneath there’s hostility and selfishness.
Edward Kemp’s revival provides a near-ideal Visit. Patricia Routledge makes a very prim-and-propero old-school person, neither taking-off coat nor sitting down till invited, inquisitive, sitting proprietorially upright and smoothing her clothes with proud satisfaction as she recounts the new formality in the style of Dodsworth’s replacement.
Edward Petherbridge’s Dodsworth, mild-mannered, grey and drained, is as bound by the routines of bowling and third-age education as he was by the office. His brief outburst in Prothero’s absence, or final appeal to his dead wife now the whole superstructure he’d created at Warburton’s has vanished, are beautifully controlled, while the moment the two sit in icy silence listening to music captures the emptiness underlying working-relationships.
In Green Forms Kemp ill-advisedly encourages Routledge and Janet Dale to strive for comic ‘moments’. It’s counter-productive and unnecessary with such actors. Routledge goes some way to subsuming her abundant personality into desk-bound wage-slave Doreen, aggrieved at her subordination, while Dale gives Doris a sour human depth.
Mark Jonathan’s lighting slowly prepares for Green Forms’s denouement, while midway Petherbridge offers a master-class cameo of non-stop verbals about membership of ASTMS, hilarious even to anyone who doesn’t recall that union’s General Secretary of the time. Bennett’s name for Lomax’s silent colleague is slyly allusive too.
A Visit From Miss Prothero
Mr Dodsworth: Edward Petherbridge
Miss Prothero: Patricia Routledge
Green Forms
Doreen: Patricia Routledge
Doris: Janet Dale
Mt Lomax: Edward Petherbridge
Dorothy Binns: Carole Street
Boswell: David Bannerman
Director: Edward Kemp
Designer: Simon Higlett
Lighting: Mark Jonathan
Sound: Jonathan Suffolk
Music: Matthew Scott
2007-04-19 10:33:25