OFFICE SUITE. To 5 April.

Tour

OFFICE SUITE
by Alan Bennett

Theatre Royal Bath Productions Tour to 5 April 2003
Belgrade Theatre Coventry to 1 March
Mon-Thu 7.30pm Fri/Sat 8pm Mat Wed 2.30pm Sat 4pm (Coventry)
Audio-described 1 March 4pm
BSL Signed 28 February
Runs 2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS: 024 7655 3055 (Coventry)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 February at Belgrade Theatre Coventry

Finely-acted revival of a double-bill which captures speech-patterns spot-on. Alan Bennett's two one-actors have a link in Warburtons, an English firm making goodness knows what, but wrapped up in its own bureaucracy. Interest here's in the dead-hand of routine and the chunks of processed language it induces. Fine performances maximise the plays' humour and underlying bitterness.

The first half's a twin star-turn, Lesley Joseph's Miss Protheroe paying an awkward visit to her retired colleague. He's bluffly cheerful in his active new life until, as a change of pace and darkening mood signal in Lawrence Till's production, Edward Hardwicke's Dodsworth finds his whole past crumbling before him: the office layout plan he's had framed and wraps as a souvenir for his successor becomes redundant, trailed around behind him like a trophy of defeat.

In a doleful final image the walls of his room close around him, after the poisonous Miss Protheroe (no Miss remains unmarried without clear cause in these plays) has gone. Lesley Joseph's chiselled Protheroe contracts tautly in upon herself, reluctant to have more contact with the world than is absolutely necessary. Sitting or standing in Dodsworth's comfortable armchair is a military-precision operation for her; her talk is all Warburton's-obsessed bureaucracy-speak.

Green Forms takes us into 1970s office-life. Its genteel secretarial pair, pinpointed by their stale office shorthand speech, just want life to continue lazily the same. 'Newport Pagnell', where Warburton's seemingly initiate changes, is their Orwellian Room 101. Threatened redundancy splits the working relationship, their desperate search for clues to their future sending the pink forms - whose circulation, along with white and green ones, defines their ordered lives - up in a chaotic paper fountain.

Mary Cunningham and Debra Penny play perfectly: Cunningham captures Doris's emotionally-restricted personality, whether swaggering in permed-hair confidence with a cigarette behind her typewriter defence, or rushing bent-kneed, as if unable to stand alone, dragging her chair behind her like a useless extra limb.

For Penny's Doreen, ignorance is bliss, her vapid, inflection-blanked voice running tonelessly on, fingers scratching with animalistic compulsion at an itchy leg, then sweeping a mild nail across her forehead in nervous order.

You might like, or not, the production overkill of the last judgmental moment: the playing is unswervingly excellent throughout.

A Visit From Miss Protheroe
Miss Prothero: Lesley Joseph
Mr Dodsworth: Edward Hardwicke

Green Forms
Doreen: Debra Penny
Doris: Mary Cunningham
Mr Lomax: Edmund Kente
Boswell: Dermot Canavan

Director: Lawrence Till
Designer: Richard Foxton
Lighting: Nick Beadle
Sound: Gregory Clarke

2003-02-25 14:47:10