SUMMER AGAIN. To 6 November.
London
SUMMER AGAIN
by David Cregan
Orange Tree Theatre To 6 November 2004
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat 4pm + 21 October 2.30pm
Post-show discussion 29 October
Runs 2hr One interval
TICKETS: 020 8940 3633
www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 18 October
An oblique Heartbreak House for the 21st century, if built on a smaller-scale than Shaw's construction.There's something old-fashioned about David Cregan's new play. It's not just the green floorcloth, with its suggestion of an idyllic English garden; it's the sure way this idyll is undermined by character and action. There's far more of the former than the latter. Dialogue more than events marks out Cregan's way.
Fortunately there's also an idiosyncratic, cavalier manner which Joyce Branagh's cast seize gratefully upon. And the tendency to types lecherous older woman, ancient quarrelling biddies with their battle of the pinnies, cad, idealist, feckless youth etc. nicely sets off the urgent contemporaneity of the subject matter.
War in Iraq is recurrently mentioned as is the president, but it's not to open up debate. Instead the references mark out English attitudes. Neighbour Gerald's a multi-millionaire, buying en masse via laptop. David Leonard plays him, under styled waving hair, as a smiling, self-acknowledging capitalist as willing to use his power to buy sex next door as supermarkets in Asia.
His target in the former, Ariadne (a name from Shaw's depiction of leisured Anglo-society in Heartbreak House) fills her time with am dram and sex when possible or required. In delicious soft-shaded clothes and with massive rings on her fingers, she parades her anti-war credentials without conviction or appreciation, a character as self-absorbed as the English elite has ever produced. And Miranda Foster comes as close as small-scale in-the-round ensemble playing allows to a star turn.
Hostilities are full throttle between the cook Molly (Eve Shickle providing rock-faced impenetrability to reason amid repeated attempts to have her rival dismissed) and part-time cleaner Emily (a splendid Vilma Hollingbery, her innocent and delicate manner contrasting her nemesis).
From Robin Parkinson's independent old English eccentric, sure only more land to cultivate will keep him alive, to Jack Sandle's indolent son writing a book about a world he believes will soon end, this is a comic, occasionally fitful, often witty observation of a stultified society where individuality only makes people more rigidly part of an inescapable social system.
Toby: Robin Parkinson
Roderick: Robert Benfield
Ariadne: Miranda Foster
Daniel: Jack Sandle
Molly: Eve Shickle
Emily: Vilma Hollingbery
Joyce: Octavia Walters
Gerald: David Leonard
Director: Joyce Branagh
Designer: Sam Dowson
Lighting: Kevin Leach
Assistant director: Jennifer Ellison
2004-10-19 13:49:27