QUEEN BEE To 23 May.
Tour.
QUEEN BEE
by Margaret Wilkinson.
North East Theatre Consortium Tour to 23 May 2009.
Runs 2hr One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 8 May at The Dukes Lancaster
Drama stuck in a room.
A cluttered stage suggests a mix of living-room and lumber-room for Margaret Wilkinson’s new play, produced by North East Theatre Consortium. It’s a complex set to be wheeling around on even a short tour, but it reflects the strange lives being lead by Wilkinson’s characters. And it’s not just disorder. The staircase of Imogen Cloet’s set looks like a candidate for one of Maurice Escher’s visual perspective conundrums, while pillared areas at the side suggest a four-poster or bunk-beds, though they’re not beds at all.
Why such clutter? It could be a shelter, protection, the comfort of something familiar to cling to, against the darkness outside. This looks to be part of a large, evidently dilapidated building, and everything suggests it’s as remote from regular life as are the characters.
Ruth is the newcomer, a brisk and efficient-seeming nurse come to care for Angel. In her crisp white uniform she seems the antithesis of everything in this dark old house. And she certainly seems to be usurping Eusapia, Angel’s housekeeper who has apparently been keeping Angel in a state of dependency. But Ruth, it turns out, has her own reasons for taking on this job in a remote place.
There’s a figure outside, one of those looming, never-defined creations of dramatists, who need very careful treatment if they’re to loom large in the action without making an appearance. Few writers can turn screws that well, and Wilkinson’s not one of them, in this play.
That leaves the women on stage, all well-performed. And for the first act things develop well enough, so long as, after the interval, the time invested's going to result in some notable eruption or resolution. Instead, within a few minutes of the interval the play, in Wils Wilson’s production, descends into unter-farce with an evidently faked-séance. From here it’s hard to take characters or anything seriously, though drama does start leaking back in towards the end.
But it’s still hard to see, overall, what’s being stated or suggested other than a kind of cabin fever truism. More matter with less manner would have helped a lot.
Director: Wils Wilson.
Designer: Imogen Cloet.
cast and full credits not available.
2009-05-15 17:16:26