THE LIFEBLOOD. To 2 October.
London
THE LIFEBLOOD
by Glyn Maxwell
Riverside Studios (Studio 3) To 2 October 2005
Tue-Sat 8pm Sun 6pm Mat 22 Sept 2pm & 1 Oct 3pm
Runs 1hr 35min No interval
TICKETS:
Review Timothy Ramsden 11 September
Superb mix of intrigue, politics and treachery, vivid and fast-paced.It's rare that top-quality writing, direction and acting come together to produce something so individual and perfect as this production. Glyn Maxwell is a poet whose blank verse script has all the best qualities of verse-drama with no shortcomings. It's fast-paced and clear, the language making maximum impact. This is verse written to be spoken rather than recited, the kind of verse drama that made the Jacobean drama so vivid with none of the overblown deficiencies infecting most subsequent attempts at the form. It is, supremely, the language of someone who understands theatre and actors.
This story of Mary Queen of Scots sits well alongside Schiller's verse-drama on Mary, giving the distaste with politicians a modern flavour: history seen through the perspective of a century that's thrown up naked dictatorship and veiled control-freakery. The Lifeblood of a nation is rancid and impure. Everyone can be manipulated and what someone sees with their own eyes can be denied when convenient. Schiller's Queen Elizabeth loads her own indecision onto a junior courtier, Davison. In Maxwell's world, a monarch isn't needed; the state apparatus works independently, injustice is its second-nature.
Guy Retallack's production exposes this with a bare brevity that matches the script. It's a black and white, modern world, events occurring abstractly in a mental torture-chamber, photo-strips and annotated maps suggesting the plans that entrap most of these characters. Watched over at the start by Chris Gilling's cold-blooded spymaster Walsingham, raised on a ladder, people go about their subsidiary treacheries; a message to Mary is spoken between two of her enemies, not in the scene but the actors' presence suggesting there are no secrets.
Sue Scott Davison's Mary stands amid this masculine world of open hostility and apparent friendship, the only truthful character, carefully laying out her documentary evidence, only to have it confiscated before her trial. It's a world where she cannot win and where power uses fear to stamp its authority. Stripped to their vests in a postlude to Mary's story, the lesser lights are given a lesson in fear before being sent on their way. All play with intensity and control; this show is magnificent.
Mary Stuart: Sue Scott Davison
Claude Arno: Daniel Hill
Sir Amyas Paulet: Paul Goodwin
Sir Thomas Gorge: Anthony Holland
Sir Francis Walsingham: Chris Gilling
Director: Guy Retallack
Designer: Dora Schweitzer
Lighting: Chris Corner
Composer: Chris Madin
Fight director: Paul Benzing
Assistant director: Sebastian Aguirre
2005-09-12 14:28:13