SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING To 2 April 2006.
Nottingham/Tour
SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING:
by Alan Sillitoe adapted by Amanda Whittington
Lakeside Arts Centre to 18 February then tour to 2 April 2006
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Wed 2pm
Pre-show talk 7th Feb, Post-show talk 13th Feb (Lakeside)
Runs 1hr 40min One interval
TICKETS: 0115 846 7777
www.lakesidearts.org.uk (Lakeside)
Review: Alan Geary: 2 February 2006
It’s a period piece, for sure; but it’s entertaining and thought-provoking.
By way of celebration of his victory in a Saturday-night drinking contest our Arthur chunders his fourteen pints all over the barman. Like the film and the novel on which it’s based, this adaptation from Nottingham writer Amanda Whittington opens with that famous scene in The White Horse.
Later on we get a drunken fight in the street and oodles of fornication.
So what’s changed since the late fifties?
Well, lots actually. The working class portrayed in this New Perspectives adaptation is a structured, homogenous community operating inside a body of rules – some of them unofficial, but rules all the same.
And there are certainties: there’s the bike factory down the road with plenty of proper jobs, the Goose Fair comes every year, and sex outside marriage will get you into trouble – though there’s usually the local backstreet abortionist on hand to help you out of it; this one’s Aunt Ada, well played by Abigail Fisher.
We’re in a simpler world, albeit over-shadowed by a Cold War and the prospect of nuclear annihilation.
But for two chairs and an adaptable screen, it’s a bare stage with an ever-present backcloth of pitheads - arguably too minimalist a set for what Whittington is trying to do.
On it we get some good performances, in particular from Nicky Rafferty, as Brenda, the frustrated married girlfriend, who has an abortion in a bath, and Abigail Fisher, as Winnie, the wantonly sexy one, also married.
But the central portrayal is Peter McCamley’s. He conveys Arthur’s pent-up, angry-young-man rage and devil-may-care attitude superbly. Some of the best moments come when, another sexual conquest impending, he looks at the audience with wicked glee, or when he opens out in a venom-filled monologue.
Pedants will notice a couple of trifling but troublesome anachronisms. Italian suits didn’t hit the scene till the early sixties, and all the way up to the seventies your canteen char came in white cups and saucers, not mugs.
Even more might have been made of the chart-toppers of the period - often a feature of Whittington’s work - but background sound of funfair, crowded pubs, and so on, is very effective.
Sillitoe’s novel was a classic kitchen-sinker but it lacked universal significance. Likewise this play: it’s a period piece; nevertheless it offers an entertaining and thought-provoking retrospective into a vanished world.
Jack/Loudmouth/Swaddie: Charlie Buckland
Winnie/Ada/Ratface/Sweeper: Abigail Fisher
Doreen/Emler/Sweeper: Susan Hastie
Arthur: Peter McCamley
Brenda/Landlady/Tealady: Nicky Rafferty
Robboe/Mick/Barman/Swaddie: William Woods
Director: Daniel Buckroyd
Designer: Anna Lavelle
Lighting: Mark Dymock
Sound: Jules Bushell
2006-02-05 19:13:35