OURS. To 4 August.
London
OURS
by Tom Robertson
Finborough Theatre Finborough Pub 118 Finborough Road SW10 9ED To 4 August 2007
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sun 3.30pm
Runs 2hr 20min One interval
TICKETS: 0870 4000 838 (24hr no booking fee)
www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk (reduced full-price tickets online)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 July
Rare outing for big-name Victorian playwright, performed with commitment and good-will.
Once, this was cutting-edge. While his patrons the Bancrofts made theatres respectable, replacing pit-benches with costlier stalls, Tom Robertson made the drama a polite reflection of middle-class lives.
Insisting on real props, and individualised sets instead of stock painted flats, Robertson revelled in surface realism. He was an Ibsen who lacked only Ibsen’s originality, insight and ability to make unconventional characters. There’s the beginnings of such in Ours (1866) with rich but discontented Hugh Chalcot, who might at least have become a Shavian character had his author possessed Shaw’s perceptive wit.
Then there’s Mary Netley, frustrated as her poverty keeps her a lady’s companion in the genteel shadow of wealthier family members. Her voice proclaims her, like all the family’s poor branch, as “Scotch”, a Victorianism similar to that of the happy ending where a poor man’s son is offered an education and army commission, while the lad’s twin sister receives nothing.
But Robertson’s using these people for conventional sympathy, just as he resorts to soliloquy whenever it suits; little of his dramaturgy matches his keen exactness with cups of tea, plus, here, mutton, veg and roly-poly pudding (not till Arnold Wesker’s The Four Seasons would the art of cooking have such prominence on stage as that improvised pud).
This is a plot of love shining through inequality, personality difficulties and married indifference - though Lady Shendryn’s unfounded suspicions of her husband’s infidelity make sense in the light of his earlier, open scorn for her, something Robertson seems later to forget. And there’s the gallantry of a Russian prince who’s first house-guest then prisoner of the English in the final act’s shift to the Crimean War.
Jagged Fence’s production is, well, jagged at times, its performances rather studied. But they make the point, showing the play off well-enough. However limited he seems compared with later, greater drama, Robertson was significant enough in his era for one of the leading late Victorian dramatists, Pinero, to make him the subject of a play. And, as so often with Finborough revivals, it’s Earl’s Court or nowhere to rediscover this dramatic legacy of ours.
Hugh Chalcot: Robert Irons
Sergeant Jones/Captain Samprey: Jon Edgley-Bond
Houghton/Prince Perovsky: Peter Machen
Blanche Haye: Emily Dobbs
Mary Netley: Emilie Patry
Lady Shendryn: Rachel Fishwick
Sir Alexander Shendryn: Christopher Gilling
Angus McAlister: Nicholas Gadd
Director: Phoebe Barran
Designer: Anna Bliss-Scully
Lighting: Nicola Brown
Sound: Robert Donnelly-Jackson
Music: Tom Attwood
2007-07-22 23:34:39