THE ANATOMIST. To 6 August.

Tour

THE ANATOMIST
by Tony Ramsey

Eastern Angles Theatre Company Tour to 6 August 2006
Runs 2hr 25min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 July at Upstairs at the Gatehouse

Science and tradition; fact and imagination in conflicts examined under a low-power microscope.
Dipping into north London during its tour of Suffolk barns, Eastern Angles returns to Upstairs at the Gatehouse, a Highgate pub theatre which considerately offers audience members cold towels during the interval of a heat-wave performance. Maybe the view seems different in East Anglia, but with the current, coincidental South Bank revival of Brecht’s Life of Galileo the question’s raised of why Ivan Cutting’s successful company, with its strong regional identity, has chosen this play as a departure from Anglian themes and settings.

The links with Brecht’s play are very close. Tony Ramsay’s central figure is Andreas Vesalius, a 16th century Belgian working in Renaissance Italy. His overturning of classical learning on human anatomy through investigating dead human corpses aroused a parallel scandal to Galileo’s heavenly findings a couple of generations on. Excitement in scientific research, unreliable authority, risk of imprisonment (rather than the torture threatening Galileo), even a secret book saved by a kind of acolyte, parallel the two lives.

Perhaps it’s fitting, with his more corporeal scientific inquiries, that Vesalius’ story is surrounded by considerable earthiness. Glov and Arial are two travellers; travelling hopefully is their job, says the older, lecherous Glov with his sick stomach and constant sexual aggression. He feels betrayed when his younger companion settles down to a job and a relationship after an incident showing the age of miracles and of science can coincide.

Ramsay’s play comes over as a semi-digested mix of Brecht and post-Brenton, Bond-age images of human dirt and excrement. It’s indifferently performed, in part because there’s limited sense of character or coherent structure; events just seem to happen. Mostly, though, because of the limitations in the central relationship, between Tom Marshall’s gruff Vesalius and Nadia Morgan as the young, apparently male, artist who wants to contribute illustrations to the great work Vesalius is writing.

This is the fault of neither the clear, efficient Marshall, nor of Morgan’s plainly, yet vividly-played assistant. Ramsay makes the different mindsets, practical and imaginative, clear but without the analytical development that could make this, amid the fundaments and appetites, a thrilling drama of intellectual debate.

Vesalius: Tom Marshall
Van Calcar: Nadia Morgan
Captain/Thief: Richard Sandells
Woman: Veronica Hempsey
Glov: Timothy Speyer
Arial/Podesta: William Gregory
Emilia/Leandra: Grainne Gillis

Director: Ivan Cutting
Designer: Rosie Alabaster
Lighting: Steve Cooney
Costume: Faby Pym
Assistant director: Emma Serlin

2006-07-20 12:08:20