SINGER. To 10 April.
London
SINGER
by Peter Flannery
Tricycle Theatre To 10 April 2004
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 4pm, 24 March 2pm
BSL Signed 1 April
Post-show discussion 1 April
Runs 2hr 35min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7328 1000
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 March
A valuable revival of a type of play too little seen nowadays.Peter Flannery's Singer was premiered in 1989 as the first new play at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Stratford-upon-Avon Swan Theatre. Date and place are important. Stretching across 5 decades, the action ran up to what was the high-Thatcherite present-day (just before the Community Charge pole-axed the PM).
Its presence in a theatre built for 17th and 18th century British drama was justified by its representing a new variation on the Jacobean revenge play. Sean Holmes' revival for Oxford Stage Company gives it a new perspective and, in Ron Cook, has a Singer less fizzing on the surface than Anthony Sher but able to draw on the wells of agony and anomie that reveal the character's motiovation.
So, it starts to seem more a psychological study than a social panorama in the manner of Howard Brenton and David Hare's Brassneck - another piece (examining society from the forties to the seventies) overdue for major revival. Yet the first act of Singer is a socio-political strip cartoon. From luck and insider trading in the prisoners' market at Auschwitz, Pyotr Zinger survives into the London black market. Riches become his by exploiting the flood of other immigrants, from the Caribbean, needing places to live, and his somehow-acquired knowledge of the seamy side of respectable British business.
Singer's rise to prominence, disgrace by tabloid exposure and Lord Lucan-like disappearance are succeeded post-interval by wider exploration of the psycho-impulses driving Ron Cook's unpredictable human atom one moment clutching to his Auschwitz companions, the next tearing fearfully into them.
It's summed up in Singer's feeling he's lived 5 lives, and in the magnificently-played scene where he confronts an ex-Auschwitz guard, destroying the woman he's come closest, in his sexual voracity, to loving. Hattie Morahan delineates the growing agony of discovering the truth about her father; for Singer it's as if her English security must be destroyed by his rootless angst.
It's a fine, bold, gripping show, with outstanding work too from the two people offsetting Singer John Light as the man making a new, coherent life and Edward Peel as the brain-battered giant, loyal, confused and abused in Singer's rages.
Singer: Ron Cook
Mrs Daley/Lady Bunty/Ellie/Woman at South Bank/Chorus: Joanne Howarth
Gloria/Secretary/Lady Basil/Denise/Chorus: Jasmine Hyde
West Indian Mother/Janice/Chorus: Jacqueline Kington
Stefan: John Light
Ruby/Maria/Chorus: Hattie Morahan
1st Kapo/Shallcross/Lord Basil/Colin/Curbishley/Chorus: Fergus O'Donnell
West Indian Father/Paul/Man at South Bank/Chorus: Chike Okonkwo
2nd Kapo/Immigration Officer/Lord & Tim Bunty/Chorus: Jamie Parker
Manik: Edward Peel
Irchuk/Harty/De Knop: Paul Rider
Miller/Daley/Lord Earner/Dawson/Chorus: Fred Ridgeway
3rd Kapo/Blythe/Pepper/Derek/Almond/Chorus: Alan Westaway
Director: Sean Holmes
Designer: Anthony Lamble
Lighting: Paul Anderson
Sound: Fergus O'Hare
Composer: Steven Edis
Movement: Michael Ashcroft
2004-03-21 14:06:27