THE NIGHT HERON. To 18 May.
London
THE NIGHT HERON
by Jez Butterworth
Royal Court, Jerwood Theatre Downstairs To 18 May
7.30 Mat Sat 3.30pm
Runs 2hr One interval
TICKETS 020 7565 5000
Review Timothy Ramsden 4 May
A sharp-etched puzzle-picture of human existence that surrenders its secrets slowly.Cambridge: university, enlightenment, science etc. Yet within 10 miles – the distance to Wattmore and Griffin's shared barn home - you can be in a Fenland world with Science and Learning indeed a world away. It's here Jez Butterworth's new play creates a rural mental fog as sharp as the fifties gangster world - very different on the surface, but comparable in terms of a localised mindset – of his debut Mojo.
Talk of Jack-o'-Lanterns mixes with a university-sponsored £1,000 poetry prize. A student's kidnapped for poetic help by the redoubtable lodger Bolla, who quotes a chunk of Andrew Marvell's The Garden learned during a verse 'module' in prison.
Watt and Griff are ex- gardeners at the university; Wattmore sacked after child-abuse allegations, Griffin after striking in sympathy. Both remain wary of their lodger, whose offer of friendship is little less fearsome than her declarations of enmity to Royce, apparently a policeman, really a special constable, by occupation a strimmer (or under-gardener) - and one of the few who'll talk to Wattmore.
He's part of the local Manichean simplification of the world into good v evil, which coagulates around Dougal, the ex- gardener who's used his industrial injury compensation to establish a local anti-evil sect.
In this world of superstitious fear next door to rational intelligence, of expulsion from employment in the ordered garden to land edged by marsh, a rare heron has come. On purpose, or blown by circumstance? No-one knows, just as nobody seems in control of their own life.
Griffin and Wattmore certainly aren't, living in fear of the locality, their wall dominated by a huge Russian icon, showing a college of saints college before God. Wattmore makes amateur recordings of bible chunks, pattered out with the semi-understanding of the dark mind which takes blame on itself with fatal consequences.
Even in Ian Rickson's detailed production, which manages to keep the rural declamation of sentences from becoming monotonous, Butterworth's play can seem self-conscious, drawing as it does on a world used often enough before – generally, more pictorially and less probingly. At times it nudges stylistically, as well as geographically, towards Edward Bond territory. But it has its own place, and holds it - as an iconic depiction of fear and over-simplified morality - intriguingly and firmly.
Wattmore: Karl Johnson
Griffin: Ray Winstone
Bolla: Jessica Stevenson
Neddy: Roger Morlidge
Royce: Paul Ritter
Jonathan: Finlay Robertson
Dougal: Geoffrey Church
Director: Ian Rickson
Designer: Ultz
Lighting: Mick Hughes
Sound: Paul Arditti
Composer: Stephen Warbeck
Dialect coach: Joan Washington
Voice work: Patsy Rodenburg
2002-05-05 11:06:18