ON SATURDAYS THIS BED IS POLAND. To 2 June.
Tour
ON SATURDAYS THIS BED IS POLAND
by Julie Wilkinson
New Perspectives Theatre Company Tour to 2 June 2007
Runs 2hr 15min one interval
Review: Alan Geary: 26 April 2007 at Lakeside Arts Centre
A crudely peddled political message.
You get an unfortunate reminder of those fifties war films with this play, when the Germans spoke in comically broken English even amongst themselves. Here it’s migrant Polish farm-workers instead. Two of them are sharing a room with a Russian so there’s plenty of antagonism.
New Perspectives writer Julie Wilkinson patronises her characters in other ways. Zofia, the older Polish woman [Fiz Marcus], being old and Polish is, naturally enough, a grasping, superstitious peasant of the old school who hides money in mattresses and sees visions involving the late Pope. And these silly foreigners are allowed to be racist in the privacy of their own bedroom in a way no English character would get away with, unless, that is, he was being anti-American.
Acting varies from bad to middling: Freddie Machin, as the love-sick son of the wicked capitalist, over-does the naivety and awkwardness and Marcus waves her arms about too much. Rebecca Hulbert, playing the good-looking Yveta, is fairly convincing, but even she, being Russian, has to hang an icon at the end of the bed.
Mirka [Beata Majka], her younger compatriot is the only character who makes you feel that people from central [not eastern please] Europe might actually be normal human-beings even though they don’t hail from Surrey.
In the first half, admittedly less so in the second, the writing is too slack to move plot and develop character sufficiently briskly. The funny lines aren’t funny.
Whether or not you buy the political message implicit in this play, you have to concede that it’s crudely peddled.
Yveta: Rebecca Hulbert
Evan: Freddie Machin
Mirka: Beata Majka
Zofia: Fiz Marcus
Director: Daniel Buckroyd
Designer: Juliet Shillingford
Composer: Matt Marks
2007-04-27 16:58:28