THE BAY AT NICE/FAMILY VOICES. To 6 May.
Colchester
THE BAY AT NICE and FAMILY VOICES
by David Hare by Harold Pinter
Mercury Theatre To 6 May 2006
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval
TICKETS: 01206 573948
boxoffice@mercurytheatre.co.uk
www.mercurytheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 May 2006
Two one-act plays exploring family tensions and the distances between family members, from the great and good of modern British dramaturgy.
David Hare’s is the first, and longer, piece here. Dating from 1986, the new age of perestroika, it’s set in Russia’s cold political thaw 30 years earlier, when premier Nikita Khruschev unexpectedly denounced Stalin.
This is a Russia where personal relations are subject to the state. Being a Communist party-member is necessary for advancement, as Colm Gormley’s bored museum functionary admits. The law requires bureaucratic expense and a long wait for the divorce 30-something Sophia wants (you even had to queue to get unhitched in the workers’ paradise).
Yet the museum needs to call on a personal relationship. The wilful Valentina was once artist Henri Matisse’s friend and her experience of him could validate the title painting. Chrstine Absolom presents her as a slightly obvious picture of flouncing arrogance, indulging her own emotional recollections, her tongue a whiplash in denouncing others’ feelings. But her talk of Matisse as observer and communicator through paint offers a contrast to the drabness on Adrian Linford’s set. The museum floor is cracked, what could be a huge painting is a black-and-white building site.
Valentina’s opposite is less her daughter or the party-hack than Peter. A generation older than Sophia, he’s the man she wants to be with because he gives her a sense of self. Robert Calvert’s outstanding as this slightly stooped figure, fiddling with his hat, nervous and deferential yet innately honest.
Linford extends the acting area, creating a distance where characters can be close or separate. For Harold Pinter’s 1981 Family Voices (written for radio and theatre) Linford opens the entire Mercury stage. The thoughts of a father (dead), mother and grown-up son are expressed as unsent letters, often so disparate the characters might come from different worlds, let alone families.
Each sits isolated on a separate bench, the chosen seat of loneliness. Movement between these never gives than any sense of communication as one character comes close to, without looking at, another. Gormley enthusiastically expresses the son’s happiness in the home of a strange substitute family while Miranda Bell is excellent as the agonised mother in both grief and subsequent bitterness.
The Bay at Nice
Valentina Nrovka: Christine Absalom
Sophia Yepileva: Kate Copeland
Assistant Curator: Colm Gormley
Peter Linitsky: Robert Calvert
Family Voices
Voice 1 Colm Gormley
Voice 2: Miranda Bell
Voice 3: Robert Calvert
Director: Sue Lefton
Designer: Adrian Linford
Lighting: Robin Carter
2006-05-03 11:52:06