THE GIRL WITH RED HAIR. To 16 April.
London
THE GIRL WITH RED HAIR
by Sharman Macdonald
Hampstead Theatre To 16 April 2005
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm
Runs 1hr 20min No interval
TICKETS: 020 7722 9301
www.hampsteadtheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 April
Many fine moments but the machine never takes to the air.Down from Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum (where an evening usually consists of more than 80 minutes) this Bush Theatre production lands across London at Hampstead, which accommodates the towering house-sides of Robin Don's set better than the tiny Bush itself (though the Lyceum, with its 3-tier splendour, provides the best scale of all).
Don captures the balmy climate in the East Neuk o' Fife, where 2 steps take you from main street to sand and where water-edged, country-backed villages provide the kind of close community Sharman Macdonald shows bound up in memory and grief.
Loss and love, including loving friendship, are spread across the generations sharpening a sense of the emotional needs of the living. It's an old theme individualised by this local habitation and given clear-etched life in many details. Elderly Ina fears her friend Sadie will leave for Devon on inheriting a hotel but cannot drag herself from her Scottish home to take up Sadie's offer of moving too. Meanwhile, she's making Sadie's life a misery with serial tetchiness over fish and chips.
There's a back-story to these two, who provide some rich scenes, with the excellent Sheila Reid showing the emotional need beneath the surface crotchets. And it is one of the few reliable rules of theatre that no part played by Sandra Voe can be uninteresting; she illumines Sadie's unspoken sadness with fine, elegiac discrimination.
Meanwhile the younger local women focus on Matt, grieving for his red-haired girl lost suddenly in an accident. They play a strange, yet convincing game, willingly or otherwise but with apparent inevitability, imagining themselves into the girl's life. It's a fine picture of childhood fantasy meeting adult preoccupations. More tangentially, local hotelier Cath starts warming to guest Stuart. So there's more than enough to stir the character and thematic pots.
Yet scenes remain separate studies. All too symptomatically, though 4 out of 5 settings are within sight of each other, characters indiscriminately taking notice of or ignore the others, heightening the sense it's all part of a dramatist's scheme. Even Mike Bradwell's scrupulous direction and a fine cast cannot achieve dramatic propulsion.
Stuart: Christopher Dunne
Cath: Patricia Kerrigan
Izzy: Helen McAlpine
Corrine: Emma Campbell Jones
Matt: Sean Biggerstaff
Sadie: Sandra Voe
Ina Sheila Reid
Pam: Joanne Cummins
Director: Mike Bradwell
Designer: Robin Don
Lighting: Gerry Jenkinson
Sound: Tom Zwitserlood
Assistant director: Jemima Levick
2005-04-05 08:32:07