PREVIOUS CONVICTIONS. To 30 April.

London

PREVIOUS CONVICTIONS
by Alan Franks

Orange Tree Theatre To 30 April 2005
Mon-Sat 7.45pm mat Sat 4pm
Runs 2hr 15min One interval

TICKETS: 020 8940 3633
www.orangetreetheatre.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 April

A complex of issues, real characters but a sense of dramatic contrivance.Ecology, capitalism and guilt resonate as the middle generation of a family battle it out, with stay-at-home, 30-something daughter Amanda to one side, and the unseen mother, in a care home, on the other.

Helena has been running domestic affairs (and husband Sebastian). Brother Tony, 17 years in South America, returns to a London of soaring property prices and care fees which soak-up the profits from any sale. Helena's efforts at home contrast Tony's in a world where their father's carelessness effectively cost a South American community their lives and homes.

Franks aptly sets the play during the clear-out of the family's attic. In the opening stretch the sorting of boxes easily distracts from story elements in dialogue that doesn't move noticeably forward. It's clear Helena, wrapped in the suspicion that has given her success in pursuing medical negligence claims, fends off others' emotional approaches, from her daughter who is still searching for a role in life, or her husband, decent but undemonstrative. He later has one worm-turning outburst, but eventually the dissatisfaction turns in on himself (James Woolley makes beautifully clear the quiet, conscientious character living with a sense of never quite achieving anything).

In a final sequence almost determinedly contrasting this static start, matters suddenly shift into a higher pitch of emotional outbursts that preceding events have hardly prepared, while a touch of melodrama seems like evasion a full-stop planted mid-sentence (just as the sentence was growing interesting, too). Throughout, with the possible exception of Helena (given a restrained authority by Auriol Smith) the various roles seem designed to take up different angles of an argument.

On its side the play provides a sense of recent shifts in British society and presents an honest view of financially favoured, if emotionally scarred, lives among the property-owning class. The disposal of income as a subject of argument is overtaken by questions about the origin of the family's money. And there's a vivid sense of the unseen mother, her mind slipping away within a healthy body, leaving her no sense of the moral quandary worked out in this attic family reunion.

Helena: Auriol Smith
Sebastian: James Woolley
Amanda: Octavia Walters
Tony: Michael Shaw

Director: Michael Napier Brown
Designer: Sam Dowson
Lighting: Stuart Burgess
Assistant director: Phoebe Barran

2005-04-29 06:52:16