PLAY BOYS (Beckett, Pinter, Mamet). Northern Stage Ensemble.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

THE PLAYBOYS

Northern Stage Ensemble, Newcastle Playhouse/ Gulbenkian Studio To 13 October 2001

TICKETS 0191 230 5151

Review Timothy Ramsden 28 September –2 October

A season of seasoned dramatic wordsmiths throws up a lot of interest, and at least one revelation.Calling the precision-word minimalists Beckett, Pinter and Mamet 'spectacular', as does Northern Stage's poster, seems initially perverse but there's a whole stream of 20th century drama bound up in their work. It's one where each image and every gesture signifies. And Northern Stage artistic director Alan Lyddiard employs these spare yet eloquent texts as counterbalance to the full-frontal physicality of his ensemble's recent tours, like Animal Farm, 1984 and A Clockwork Orange.

Mamet takes the mainstage. Karen Kessler's production of Glengarry Glen Ross (1hr 40min; one interval) catches much of the play's interwoven duplicities, lacking only a final degree of security in the explosive inarticulacy of its performances. Alex Elliott's especially on the ball as the real estate office boss Williamson, smart yet empty, persuasive yet corrupt if you can meet his price, while Tony Neilson turns in a spot-on show of self-absorbed careerism as super-salesman Roma.

For Mamet's less celebrated piece about a smart life breaking apart amid big city anonymity, Edmond (1hr 15min; no interval), Lyddiard abandons the auditorium and puts his audience lengthways on stage with a narrow traverse acting strip where crowds periodically commute while Elliott's Edmond leaves his wife and engages in snap scenes of sex and money (that's sex, money and sex and money). He ends up in prison, his search for truth and attempts to put a just value on what he's paying for leading him to murder. A few brief lapses of the spitfire dialogue apart, it’s a good revival.

In the Gulbenkian studio meanwhile, director Richard Gregory has carved out a sequence of performing areas for three Becketts (35 min; no interval). We stand around a sandy waste littered with plain brown parcels for the 30 second Breath - just that, a cry and amplified in-drawn breath followed by an exhalation and second cry – a life-cycle devoid of life, over a detritus-strewn world.

Then we sit to face the three clay-caked, urn-bound faces that recall the absurdity of human love, jealousy and hate from the dead-land in Play, before entering a chamber to stand for the urgent biographical recall of the disembodied mouth of Not I.

The finale is a reprise of Breath. The brown parcels now lie open, revealing their emptiness. It's a finely conceived structure of some of the master's little-uns.

But it's Gregory's revival of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter (1hr, no interval) that's a real highlight. It takes place in the same space as Not I, a walled prison with décor suggesting both childhood and unfamiliarity with its turbaned, bearded heads on a light background. The audience watches from a rim of seats overhead.

So much pondering over the famous Pinter pauses came out of very middle-class, very old-style RADAH performers acting to West End type audiences. In such company the dialogue seemed exotic and unlikely. But Pinter was an East End lad and the down to earth Tyneside tones provide an equivalent for East Lunnon-speak.

Here the evasions, power-play and scrabbling for handholds through language seem natural, arising from minds unused to forming the likes of subordinate clauses and subjunctive moods. It's all very real.

Not that this removes the tension. The anxiety of Mark Calvert's Gus and the gradually dislodged assurance of Neilson's Ben emerge with new clarity in this social context.

The season has also included Gregory's revival of Pinter's The Collection and ends with a visit from Scotland's In Company offering Russell Hunter in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.
It's a moot point whether a series of shows mostly around an hour is what audiences want as part of an evening out, or if it's just short measure for people who have tramped into a city centre venue. But it shows the purposeful artistic drive that marks out Newcastle's major theatre group.

2001-10-04 01:10:58