TEN TINY TOES. To 5 July.
Liverpool.
TEN TINY TOES
by Esther Wilson.
Everyman Theatre To 5 July 2008.
Runs 2hr 10min One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 July.
Impact of war finely portrayed.
Gradually, in recent years, Liverpool’s two producing theatres have developed a body of new plays that look at the city from various prismatic angles – documentary, mythic, historical included – while delivering a hefty emotional thump that avoids sentimentality in their truthfulness to experience.
Through them, a new league of Liverpool playwrights is emerging to follow the generation of Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale and Bill Morrison. Esther Wilson’s among them with this story of the Iraq War’s invasion of Liverpool people’s lives, especially the Kent family’s.
This is war impacting on an economically depressed city. Father’s set up in a small business that’s gone under, but remains resilient even as tension grows at home. Younger son joins older in the army, somewhere that has a place for him instead of hanging around home eating crisps.
Wilson’s kaleidoscopic play involves peace-protesters, the officer class whose offspring are wrongly assumed to be safe in Iraq, and includes a voice from, and for, the army. It’s young soldier Michael Kent, brushing off criticism of the military, handling bereavement as a matter of course. He may be drunken at his violence-bordering attack on the pro-peace lobby, but his argument is clear and he ends standing to attention with a sense of the dignity army-life provides.
It’s in the peace-protest, with its detailed arrangements, that Wilson’s play almost falters, but it’s scarcely noticeable, given the force with which she presents the Kent’s home life and especially the growth of Gill Kent. The family home is islanded amid a stage desert, fittingly as the war invades their lives both on TV (footage screened on the rear stage-wall), in personal relationships and in fatal news, arriving as one of their sons points his rifle homewards in a sharp image linking Merseyside and Basra. Fittingly, Gill, who starts passively watching TV, ends up highly articulate on camera.
Polly Teale directs with the army of visual devices she’s previously used to give novels vivid life on stage. Their judicious use creates a tough, moving production, its fine cast including Lisa Parry as the ordinary mum who finds new energy in grief.
Maya Johnson: Joanna Bacon.
Lucy Cope: Fionnuala Dorrity.
Michael Kent: David Lyons.
Mike Kent/Colonel Weston: Barry McCormick.
Gill Kent: Lisa Parry.
Chris Kent/Reporter: Joe Shipman.
Olivia Weston: Paula Stockbridge.
Director: Polly Teale.
Designer: Angela Simpson.
Lighting: Chris Davey.
Sound/Nusic: Peter Salem.
Video: Lorna Heavey.
Dialect coach: Jan Haydn Rowles.
Dramaturg: Suzanne Be;;.
Assistant director: Chris Tomlinson.
2008-07-07 10:45:12