RESTORATION. To 14 October.

Exeter

RESTORATION
by Edward Bond
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 2.30pm
Northcott Theatre 10-14 October 2006
Runs 2hr 40min One interval

TICKETS: 01392 493493
www.northcott-theatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 October at Oxford Playhouse

Remorseless Restoration royally revived.
Those politically-assertive Bs, Edward Bond and Howard Barker, both responded to Margaret Thatcher’s arrival by looking back in anger. Barker’s Victory compared resurgent Conservatism with Charles II’s restoration while, despite his title, Edward Bond gave Restoration Comedy’s cruel spirit an 18th century dressing. An alliance of needy aristocracy with socially ambitious industrial wealth leads to an unhappy marriage and to deaths.

As always, it’s the servants who really suffer, pliant Bob and resentful Frank. Bond gradually blackens the action from dark-comic brio to utter darkness. The process is traced by Robert East’s 2 characters, a vicar full of authority-supporting doctrines and Hardache, popping up occasionally to give his determined self-interest a new airing.

Colin Richmond’s set anticipates the darkening from its first-scene blacked-out tree through the prison-bars filling the stage for jail scenes. The wealthy people’s fantasticated wigs are greyed-out, images of people at once pretentious and deadly.

Rupert Goold’s production for Headlong Theatre (formerly Oxford Stage Company) in conjunction with Bristol Old Vic, makes a welcome break from a year re-heating productions from his time at Northampton Royal. The cast catch the precise note of this self-conscious dialogue. “Here comes my money", says Lord Are, seeing his prospective wife approach;” it isn’t a world of subtle motivation.

Mark Lockyer develops the nastiness that makes his painted smile become increasingly an open sore. Dorothea Myer-Bennett’s his equal in discontent, her powerlessness as a woman leading to her depersonalised antics as a feigned spirit.

The servants are as simply-drawn though with some human infusion, to match the plain faces with which they contrast their social superiors’ painted, power-wigged appearance. The songs, with new music and some new lyrics by Bond for the age of suicide-bombers, are semi-intelligible, their grimness either contrasting the humour or undermining it with concrete-slab sloganning, according to taste.

In this fine cast, Beverley Klein excels, both as singer and in her creation of the tableau known in politically aware theatre as gestus. Worth seeing, and a reminder, with parts of The Sea and The Women that Bond, like Barker, combines cruelty with a bleak and searching wit.

Rose: Madeline Appiah
Mr Hardache/Parson: Robert East
Mother/Lady Are: Beverley Klein
Lord Are: Mark Lockyer
Ann/Mrs Wilson: Dorothea Myer-Bennett
Frank: Michael Shaeffer
Bob: Mark Stobbart

Director: Rupert Goold
Designer: Colin Richmond
Lighting: Oliver Fenwick
Sound/Composer: Adam Cork
Assistant director: Louise Simpson

2006-10-11 10:26:54