PAINTING A WALL To 6 June.

London.

PAINTING A WALL
by David Lan.

Finborough Theatre Finborough Brasserie118 Finborough Road SW10 9ED To 30 May 2009.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat & Sun 3pm.
Runs 1hr 10min No interval.

TICKETS: 0844 847 1652 (24hr no booking fee).
www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 May. 2009.

Play that’s better than watching paint dry.
Here’s a play that does what it says on the tin. David Lan’s been Artistic Director of London’s innovative Young Vic Theatre for a decade, but back in 1974 he was a beginner playwright, this piece fitting the vogue around then for work-related plays. A tent’s erected and dismantled in David Storey’s The Contractor, painting goes on throughout Stephen Lowe’s adaptation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, while Peter Terson’s double-bill Vince Lays the Carpet and Fred Erects the Tent speak for themselves.

The whole idea speaks of the time, when manual labour had sophisticated cred., when work was what men (and it generally was – as here – men) were expected to do. Group occupations allow chat and give rise to tensions. By giving the characters a reason for being together, and something to do, the problem of plot is solved, and actions can cause implications in audience minds.

Of course there’s more going on than the daily job; otherwise there’d be an extremely limited point in writing the play. This wall is being painted in Cape Town, in 1974, by Black workers in an apartheid society. The impact of that society remains unspoken but resonates in the audience’s minds, There’s no clue to whose wall is being painted. All we know is it’s supposed to be white but they’ve been provided with green paint. So, green it’s going to be, because painting’s what they’re paid to do.

There’s just one moment of shocking violence – more shock than violence. It forces its way as an expression of a grief announced yet barely spoken about during the play. Similarly, when young Peter wanders off unannounced he might be drifting from work into crime or might be finding an independence from the community of older workers who go about their business and change nothing. At the end, job done, the remaining three left quietly leave; the painted wall stands, blank and bleak.

Titas Halder’s Finborough production for JQ Productions and Generation 2 might have allowed more casual work detail as the men arrive, but is otherwise good, the four actors producing believable, varied, characters

Willy: Howard Charles.
Samson: Syrus Lowe.
Peter: Jacob Anderson.
Henry: Peter Landi.

Director: Titas Halder.
Designer: Alex Marker.
Lighting: James Smith.
Sound: Samuel Charleston.

2009-05-19 19:14:46