RAFTS AND DREAMS.To 18 October.
Manchester
RAFTS AND DREAMS
by Robert Holman
Royal Exchange Studio To 18 October 2003
8,10,14,17 7.30pm
18 October 8pm
Mat 11 October 4pm,16 October 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
TICKETS: 0161 833 9833
www.royalexchange.co.uk
Review:Timothy Ramsden
A good production, with some fine performances, but the script cuts them adrift.Between dream and nightmare. Robert Holman's The Estuary at London's Bush Theatre in 1980 was beautifully-observed theatre, its characters rising naturally from their own world, depicted in fine detail.
In summer 2003, Holman's Holes in the Skin at Chichester's Minerva Theatre was a repetitious, overblown 3 hours plus (originally four hours). Yet, even within that play's over-schematic wanderings, it was possible to find traces of the dramatist Holman can be.
This 1990 script, first seen at the Royal Court's tiny Theatre Upstairs in West London, is midway between these two in more than time. And the implications that go beyond realism, traceable in the companion Exchange offering, Across Oka from 2 years earlier, here become open fantasy.
It's one since used by playwright Alex Jones in his River Up, seen at seaside Scarborough and in watery Worcester.
Holman's use is heavier-going, but more laden with significance. It begins in north London, with educated medic Neil helping his inarticulate neighbour Leo treat Leo's wife Hetty for what seems a life-denying mix of agoraphobia (she's not been outside for 5 months) and obsessive-compulsive disorder - an hour making sure a light's off or a door locked. With further phobia about touching even the cleanest object for fear of dirt.
But Leo's brighter than you'd think - he made sergeant-major in the army with a commission in the potential offing - and Neil claims a childhood
brought up by generations of maternal prostitutes and sucked in to child-sex videos.
He tells us this at a length which may be intended to be virtuoso but (not helped by Laurence Mitchell's clean-cut but vocally restricted performance) comes over as dramatically stodgy and clumsy.
Soon, for no reason, we're on the roof - and that includes an improving Hetty (Julia Rounthwaite bringing delicate detail to her fears and struggles to overcome them), then in Leo's garden, uprooting a tree.
So far, so realistic. But gushing under the tree-roots is a stream, which rises, Noah's-flood like, to engulf the world.
Setting out on a raft (yes, there has been a dream recounted too) the three pick up Jo, wife to the imprisoned pornographer who used to exploit Neil. By now, any sense of plot reality has been thoroughly doused, and the play continues downstream in dream-mode.
Leo and Hetty stop off to start up a new life on a leper island - ultimate victory over herself for Hetty and a chance for Leo's intelligence to find its practical expression. The others drift on, picking up artist Alex,who has the will to survive. Despite coming from the sort of school where everyone's expected to have chauffeurs, he fiddles with a broken-down vehicle to get it going, as Neil gives way to despair.
After some rowing (ie arguing, not boat-propelling) between Jo and Neil, which seems manufactured and convincing, probably, only in the dramatist's mind, Jo easily transfers her interest to Alex. Survival's what matters, and as she salves his injured hand, there's a quietly tentative resolution, of hopeful possibility (if far from optimistic certainty), as between the young men at the end of Across Oka.
Giles Cooper gives the initially vague-seeming artistic Alex a focus on practicality, and there's continuing emotional truth in Cate Hamer's Jo, even when the writing's at its least focused.
With exceptional work from Craig Cheetham, who handles Leo's sudden mind-switches (a flavour of Howard Barker in the writing's sudden surprises) so as to make them believable and clear, Tim Stark's production does well by Holman's script.
But the play itself seems stolid, lost in its own concept, and too wordily exploring ideas the playwright's still struggling to dramatise completely. If only this raft had dream-drifted back into the focused world of The Estuary.
Leo: Craig Cheetham
Alex: Giles Cooper
Jo: Cate Hamer
Neil: Laurence Mitchell
Leper Woman: Eileen O' Brien
Hetty: Julia Rounthwaite
Director: Tim Stark
Designer: Simon Daw
Lighting: Richard Owen
Sound: Gerry Marsden
2003-10-07 14:59:39