THE DRAWER BOY. To 29 November.
Mold.
THE DRAWER BOY
by Michael Healey.
Clwyd Theatre Cymru (Emlyn Williams Theatre) To 29 November 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 2.45pm.
Runs 2hr One interval.
TICKETS: 0845 330 3565.
www.clwyd-theatr-cymru.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 22 November.
Present-day theatre brings the past to life.
This is the third production to open in Britain this year of Canadian Michael Healey’s 1999 play, its popularity coming from mixing a sense of profundity with evident human sympathies.
A mystery story, with layers of fabrication gradually peeled away, the play's also about a longstanding relationship under pressure. And it looks at the pretences people erect as protections against uncomfortable truths: The Mousetrap meets Of Mice and Men in conversation with The Wild Duck. Meanwhile, parallels with Hamlet’s antic disposition emerge.
Naturally, Healey doesn’t encompass the entire scope of all those plays as city-bred young actor Miles, researching material for a theatre project on farm-life, asks to stay on Angus and Morgan’s prairie farm in 1972.
He discovers Angus has no memory; only messages drummed into his mind seem to stick, such as the tragic account of a wartime love affair and the accident that caused his brain-damage. Gradually, Miles leads Angus to memories of times past. Or so it seems, as truth turns out more complex than it first seems.
Beneath this, the play is a triangular rearrangement of an often-used dramatic device, where the shifting relationship between two people clutches audience emotions, while Healey incorporates the way people wrap comforting lies round harsh experience with a mix of self-interest and altruism. As Miles becomes more concerned for Angus, Morgan seems duplicitous. But only the final moments reveal what lies in the thirty year-old past.
Barry Kyle’s revival benefits hugely from the informal company of strong Welsh actors developed in recent years at Mold. Behind the puzzlement or pleasant smile with which Angus greets anything he can’t recall or has momentarily re-accepted, Robert Blythe invests his character with increasingly complex concern as he opens up to the past, while Ifan Huw Dafydd seems both implacable and vulnerable as Morgan, who knows what the pair face if they turn to their history.
Guy Lewis has an innocent benevolence as Miles becomes involved in the older men’s lives, its steadiness laid out in the wooden farm-buildings of Martyn Bainbridge’s set, backed by an expanse of suggested cornfields, all richly sculpted by Nick Beadle’s lighting.
Bainbridge lays his landscape, puddle and all, in a line. There’s a similar sense that, once the mystery’s resolved the play is more feelgood with a sad twist than penetrating as the Hamlet links might suggest. But Healey gives an involving, clearly laid-out prairie-ride to past realities.
Angus: Robert Blythe.
Morgan: Ifan Huw Dafydd.
Miles: Guy Lewis.
Director: Barry Kyle.
Designer: Martyn Bainbridge.
Lighting: Nick Beadle.
Sound: Matthew Williams.
Music: Ilona Seckacz.
2008-11-23 12:00:01