SPRINGBOARD III: SHARP RELIEF and FEN. Salisbury Playhouse in rep to 1 December.

Salisbury

SPRINGBOARD III:

SHARP RELIEF
by Zoe Lewis
in rep with
FEN
by Caryl Churchill

Salberg Studio, Salisbury Playhouse In rep to 1 December 2001
Runs 1hr 30min; 1hr 35min No interval

TICKETS 01722 320333
Review Timothy Ramsden 15 November

New actors flex their skills in a new local play and a modern classic.Salisbury's artistic director Joanna Read is continuing a valuable idea inaugurated by her predecessor Jonathan Church. Called Springboard, it involves hiring a company of actors newly-graduated from drama school and casting them in a repertory of two contrasting plays. Audiences are offered the chance to catch new performers trying out central roles and the rare chance to see how a whole company changes – or remains much the same – in different styles of playwrighting.

This is Springboard's third year and they're risking a new play. Generally one new element is enough in a show. A new writer's script can benefit from experienced direction and performers. Young actors can develop by meeting the demands of a proven script.

Driving local writer Zoe Lewis's Sharp Relief are those familiar delays of our time, disrupted train services and official bureaucracy. Matched with these is the old human attributes of lying and queue-jumping as individuals across a social spectrum try to grab themselves emergency passports.

Lewis's short scenes move rapidly and hold the interest. The serial killer haunting the action could well be the sole male, the lonely, potentially aggressive Bernard. Devoid of social aptitude, he's living evidence that anoraks are born, not made. But that would make the killer plot too obvious; instead the conclusion is dramatically improbable, though it offers a theatrical surprise.

The cast generally do justice to a piece which offers them playable parts rather than challenging characters.

These come in Caryl Churchill's 1983 play Fen, where Lewis's urban individualism is exchanged for the constrictions of potato-pickers in the East Anglian countryside. Casual work for workers who are treated casually mixes with the replacing of tax-impoverished family farmers by international agri-business and a chaos of emotional longings and frustrations. The whinging folk of Radio 4's West Midlands farming soap The Archers should take an awayday east to find real rural suffering.

Gemma Fripp's T-section stage exchanges the anonymous urban flooring of Lewis's play for earth and a cottage kitchen; Douglas Rintoul's productions move smartly through both plays. While the lack of a full age spectrum in the cast is slightly limiting in Fen, it's compensated for by the cast's evident commitment to this tightly economical script. Every word counts, and they know it.

Salisbury has picked out some good emerging actors in its new company. Eleanor Montgomery in particular impresses as Lewis's bored bureaucrat who has most of the best arguments and in a range of Churchill characters.

SHARP RELIEF
Nathalie: Gemma Catlin
Bernard: Gareth Farr
Sadie: Charlotte Lucas
Grace: Jenni Maitland
Belle: Sara Masters
Tracey: Eleanor Montgomery

FEN
Val: Gemma Catlin
Wilson/Frank/Mr Tewson/Geoffrey: Gareth Farr
Angela/Deb/Mrs Finch: Charlotte Lucas
Boy/Mrs Hassett/Becky/Alice/Ivy: Jenni Maitland
Japanese Businessman/Nell/May/Mavis: Sara Masters
Shirley/Shona/Miss Cade/Margaret: Eleanor Montgomery
Shirley/Shona/Miss Cade/Margaret: Eleanor Montgomery

Director: Douglas Rintoul
Designer: Gemma Fripp
Lighting: Peter Hunter
Sound: Diane Prentice
Music: Ed Daniel

2001-11-21 08:14:14