THE GLEE CLUB. To 13 November.
Bolton/Tour
THE GLEE CLUB
by Richard Cameron
Octagon Theatre To 3 July then tour to 13 November 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 3 July 2pm (Bolton)
Runs 2hr 10min One interval
TICKETS: 01204 520661 (Bolton)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 June
Sweet-sung harmonies and discordant dialogue beautifully orchestrated in Mike Bradwell's revival.Already a success at director Mike Bradwell's home, London's excellent Bush Theatre, and in West End transfer, this play has been largely recast but remains a strong, funny and moving account of people in a time and place - 1961 Yorkshire - where the sixties hadn't begun to swing. In that sense, it's a rough male equivalent to Amanda Whittington's examination (also with a cappella songs) of contemporary female experience in Be My Baby - though this piece provides bathwater in place of baby.
At least there's the miners' showers, where casual nude scenes helped ensure none of the elderly ladies in Bolton's matinee slept through the afternoon. Though there's little risk of that. This is a fine play, its apparently casual build-up of glum experience beautifully co-ordinated in Bradwell's production to give a cumulative sense of lives knocked out of kilter by human nature and its needs hitting the coal-face of social expectations.
It could be quite a clutter - secretive homosexuality (still criminal then), marriages falling apart - deserters and deserted both apparent here - pregnancy and quick abortion. All in the world of Yorkshire miners where 'community' takes on a negative aspect, summed up in the references to voyeurism, tittle-tattle and anonymous letters.
Glee is confined to the music (skilfully and wittily performed), where close harmony attempts, against changes in musical fashion and tensions in life, to provide entertainment and fund-raising for charity, in contrast to the growing hostilities brought in from the outside.
Bruce Macadie's set places the showers within slate-like walls, unremittingly cold, dark and hard. Miseries grow within this unforgiving world in a gradual yet remorseless way. Harshness finds only brief, unexpected cavities of sympathy (itself expressed in defiant terms) among the shifting dynamics of the men's relationships, their sense of loyalty easily turning to feelings of betrayal.
Mike Robertson's stark lighting emphasises this world, helping provide the space for the individual qualities of the uniformly excellent, and finely-delineated, performances: Colin Tarrant's compressed fury as the morally-driven Bant, Stefan Bednarczyk's reserved correctness as the blackmailed Phil - significantly, it's the director of music who is at the centre of the homophobia which largely splits the group apart.
Between these two, the other four performances are equally precise. And behind them is Bradwell, as scrupulous a director of scripts as there is, with a genius forever concealing itself to bring out detail and nuance with an honesty and perceptiveness very few can equal, let alone with such unfailing consistency.
Phil: Stefan Bednarczyk
Walt: Mike Burns
Scobie: Steve Garti
Jack: James Hornsby
Colin: Oliver Jackson
Bant: Colin Tarrant
Director: Mike Bradwell
Designer: Bruce Macadie
Lighting: Mike Robertson
Sound: Andy Smith
Musical Director: Stefan Bednarczyk
2004-06-27 17:31:14