PEOPLE AT SEA. To 22 March.
Salisbury.
PEOPLE AT SEA
by J B Priestley.
Salisbury Playhouse To 22 March 2009.
Mon-Wed 7.30pm Thu-Sat 8pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm.
Audio-described 20 MKarch 2.30pm & 8pm.
BSL Signed 19 March
Post-show discussion 18 March.
Runs 2hr 40min One interval.
TICKETS: 01722 320333.
www.salisburyplayhouse.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 29 February.
A playwright adrift.
Priestley was dramatic flavour of the year in 1937, becoming one of the few living dramatists to have three simultaneous West End productions (Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Alan Ayckbourn have been others). Its coevals are among Priestley’s most enduring plays, yet People at Sea sank without trace, until manfully dredged up now in Salisbury.
The reason’s not hard to detect. Both other plays concern characters whose fates we care about. Time and the Conways offers hope for people caught in traps their own personalities forge, while the time-theory of I Have Been Here Before’s Dr Gortler is presented with an urgency that demands decisions from people we care about.
Director Philip Wilson describes People at Sea, with its twelve characters marooned on a burnt-out liner, as a thriller – a plot-based genre. Most thirties thrillers are long-buried, and plot was never Priestley’s strong point. The thrillerish happenings, including an offstage wireless mysteriously wrecked (never clearly explained), arson, a coshing, a killing, more intended murders, and two suicides, plus a suicide attempt, are awkwardly meshed within a pre-determined assessment of society.
For Priestley had higher pretensions. Writing as a new war loomed he saw a need for social change, which underlined his writing and political activities in the 1940s. Here his humanistic deus ex machina is a Professor who’s always ready to talk but never expounds the thesis he finally tears up. Thankfully, Christopher Ravenscroft gives the character a tweedy tact, at least until setting himself up as jury, judge and executioner of the rebel worker whose revolutionary violence Priestley abruptly dispatches.
He also removes the outcasts, a stateless migrant and resentful servant. Meanwhile a disenchanted novelist and aging film-star are given a chance at unlikely reform.
Mike Britton’s impressive set, finely lit by Ian Scott, places the wrecked ship amid a swirling sea. There are several reliable performances, though it’s hard to sympathise with a star who’s played merely as a bundle of mannerisms.
This is a rare chance to see the play try and take the stage; afterwards, however, it’s surely bound for the dry-dock of the library shelf.
Frank Jefferson: Max Dowler.
Ripton: John Elkington.
Miles: Jamie Bradley.
Nona Stockton: Isla Carter.
Professor Pawlet: Christopher Ravenscroft.
Ashford Myricks: Robert Jezek.
Mrs Westmoreland: Jan Carey.
Carlo Velburg: Christopher Harper.
Boyne: Nicolas Tennant.
Miriam Pick: Emily Pithon.
Valentine Avon: Damien Matthews.
Diana Lismore: Juliet Howland.
.
Director: Philip Wilson.
Designer: Mike Britton.
Lighting: Ian Scott.
Sound: John Leonard.
Composer: Richard Hammarton.
Voice coach: Jan Haydn Rowles
Fight director: Philip D’Orleans.
2008-03-03 00:55:54