SERJEANT MUSGRAVE'S DANCE. To 22 November.

Tour

SERJEANT MUSGRAVE'S DANCE
by John Arden

Oxford Stage Company Tour to 22 November 203
Runs 2hr 40min Two intervals
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 November at Oxford Playhouse

Rare revival captures much of this forceful drama.This is a curtain-call crusher, the cast barely fitting on the stage. Interesting such profligate cast numbers could be called on in 1959 by the young John Arden. A decade later his play's topicality was emphasised when John McGrath wrote Serjeant Musgrave Dances On, updating this story of Victorian soldiers returning from an empire war to a north England town during a miners' strike, to modern squaddies back from Ireland - during a miners' strike.

Today, the play seems gritty yet pebbled with artificial moments. Black-Jack' Musgrave keeps iron discipline over his men while staring them in the eye. But their wild behaviour out of his sight suggests military discipline's gone AWOL. As have these deserters. Far from the recruiting, strike-breaking troopers the parodied local bigwigs take them for, Musgrave and men are on an angry mission to raise awareness and exact revenge for the ricocheting death-score of occupying soldiers and occupied rebels abroad.

The drama's most tense in the final act when the covers fly off and the Gatling gun's trained on the crowd. The most intriguing scene's set the night before. As Henry V's heroics at Agincourt are preceded by the nocturnal exploration of his army, Musgrave's men reveal for one of them, fatally inwards fears as the barmaid whores around them (Maxine Peake, tough as a coal-face, contrasting Lynda Rooke's shrewd, smiling landlady).

It's a complex, dense piece and Sean Holmes' production has fine performances, led by Edward Peel's granite Musgrave, outer strength emanating from inward moral rage under iron control. We see the dangers of this self-containment, of military skills turned to individual ends - for Musgrave is both right and wrong.

The end's let down by Richmond syndrome'. As Shakespeare's Richmond conquers Richard III, yet the central villain's generally the stronger actor, so the order-re-establishing dragoon can hardly muster a dramatic strength matching Peel's.

And while the void framing the play no set for the opening or final scenes may make a point about Musgrave's limbo, it also looks under-produced. The middle-classes play all too much into their stereotypes, but the colliers are well-characterised.

Private Sparky: Billy Carter
Private Hurst: Tobias Menzies
Private Attercliffe: John Stahl
Bludgeon: Fred Pearson
Serjeant Musgrave: Edward Peel
Parson: Sam Cox
Mrs Hitchcock: Lynda Rooke
Annie: Maxine Peake
Constable: Simon Walter
Mayor: Colin Tarrant
A Slow Collier: Jonah Russell
A Pugnacious Collier: David Hollett
Walsh: Dermot Kerrigan
Officer of Dragoons/Collier: Paul Rainbow

Director: Sean Holmes
Designer: Anthony Lamble
Lighting: Simon Bennison
Sound: Fergus O' Hare
Composers: James Dodgson, Jeremy Holland-Smith
Movement: Mike Ashcroft
Dialect coach: Jeanette Nelson
Fight director: Terry King

2003-11-12 12:03:58