PROTEST & PRIVATE VIEW. To 6 December.
Richmond.
PROTEST and PRIVATE VIEW
by Vaclav Havel translated by Carol Rocamora and Tomas Rychetsky.
Orange Tree Theatre
24-28 November 7.45pm Mat 22, 29 Nov 3pm, 27 Nov (+ post-show discussion) 2.30pm.
Runs 1h4 45min One interval.
TICKETS: 020 8940 3633.
www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 November.
Vanek, like Strindberg, shows silence can mean strength.
Admittedly, it helps to have seen, or to be seeing, the other Vaclav Havel Vanek play, Audience (in a double-bill with Mountain Hotel in the Orange Tree’s autumn-long Havel season). But only because it sets the mood for these humorously serious pieces, gives a chance to catch three different actors from the Orange Tree’s current ensemble playing the mild-mannered dissident character (with his apparent lack of character), and explains these two plays’ references to Vanek working in a brewery.
Written in the post-Prague Spring 1970s when Soviet-imposed absolutism stifled creative energy in Havel’s native Czechoslovakia, these plays offer in Ferdinand Vanek someone either subdued by imprisonment, or simply not a personality to rush to judgment. As in Audience, Protest shows this calm manner heating guilt in an interlocutor. Here it’s a fellow writer whose sympathy for Vanek, it’s increasingly clear, covers his guilt over conforming with the authorities.
Stanek’s huge writing-desk is a fortress from which he eventually makes a sortie round his room as Vanek quietly sits. He returns to it as Vanek asks him to sign a petition supporting an imprisoned musician. Jonathan Guy Lewis’s confident appearance is gradually undercut by his moral uncertainty, attempting various arguments – how much he’s suffered in delays to his TV script, how easy life must be for the openly dissident.
Meanwhile, Christopher Naylor’s Vanek waits quietly before calmly seeking Stanek’s signature. Then Havel produces a neat shift that apparently justifies Stanek’s action, yet is actually the instrument of his moral mortification.
If that’s a final comic twist with a bitter aftertaste, Private View is Havel’s closest call to Abigail’s Party. Vanek’s trendy 70s friends Michael (Stuart Fox, earnestly self-satisfied) and his wife Vera (a gorgeously ghastly Carolyn Backhouse) are an appallingly self-satisfied couple, ineptly filling their would-be artistic home with religious objets, and displaying their sexual smugness to Mike Sengelow’s mild-mannered Vanek, while intrusively commenting on his life.
Behind it is maybe the coarsening of sensibility in a dictatorship. Yet it would be hard to find a modern democracy without similar absurdities which could be laughed at, as they certainly are here.
Protest:
Stanek: Jonathan Guy Lewis.
Vanek: Christopher Naylor.
Private View:
Michael: Stuart Fox.
Vera: Carolyn Backhouse.
Vanek: Mike Sengelow.
Director: Sam Walters.
Designer: Sam, Dowson.
Lighting: John Harris
Assistant directors: Imogen bond, Katie Henry.
2008-11-17 16:18:50