THE SANCTUARY LAMP. To 29 November.

Manchester

THE SANCTUARY LAMP
by Tom Murphy

Royal Exchange Studio To 29 November 2003
Mon-Fri 7.30pm Sat 8pm Mat Thu 2.30pm Sat 4pm
After Show discussion 27 November 7.30pm
Runs 2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS: 0161 833 9833
boxoffice@royalexchange.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 22 November

A distinguished - at times outstanding - UK premiere that leaves you wanting more of this fine Irish writer.
Tom Murphy's not the most fashionable Irish playwright in Britain. He's certainly not the easiest. But Jacob Murray's often rivetting UK premiere of this (authorially much-modified) 1975 play indicates why the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre, was filled with a Murphy season a couple of years ago.

In form and characters The Sanctuary Lamp treads such traditional dramatic ground, it's amazing it doesn't seem derivative. A meeting-place - a dowdy Catholic church - where human strays arrive, talk, then depart.

But the scintillating dialogue, uncovering familiar and unusual experience, unshowily brings an intensity that's wholly original. Harry, claiming to be a Catholic (he's a Jew) grabs the security of a job as church clerk, offered by a priest who carries the sore of missed preferment, finding consolation in discovering the works of Hermann Hesse.

Harry's a strong-man running from what remains of his troupe; his wife, her lover Francisco and a dwarf named Sam. Their act is a kind of private-hire living-room circus combined with theft.

Sandwiched between Harry and, after the interval, Francisco who's sought him out, is Maudie, frail in mind and body, suffering cruelty to the point of abuse from the grandparents she lives with, half-understanding the shame of her illegitimate child.

Di Seymour's ecclesiatical fabric seems to arise directly from the Exchange Studio's subdued-colour walls. The sense of pulpit, statuary and confessional all lingering from a routine past its time combines with the sense of sanctuary in the one bright spot in the place - the candle-lamp that Harry is charged with maintaining as an eternal flame keeping alive the spirit of Jesus.

It's only when Francisco arrives, with news of the "circus's" final humiliating outing that anti-religion's openly expressed. Murphy offers something more complex, a voyage to discover how the human spirit keeps burning amid the mutilations life inflicts on people.

Murphy set the action in Enlgand; Murray places it in the north. The dialogue's largely composed of two-person conversations and, as the production clearly shows, whatever quietly explosive discoveries are made, everyone enters unassertively.

Harry's there before the action begins, silent in a pew. The Monsignor wanders into the space reading, his mind away from his surrounds. Maudie's first seen flitting secretively around the edges, and even Francisco hides from the other men when he first enters.

John Watts captures a hushed uncertainty, an authority unsure of itself, while Rachel Brogan's Maudie is finely affecting, never falling into the pathetic Dickensian waif, maintaining a sense of containment, of a world entirely comprehensible to herself, accepting punishment from elders and mockery from her own age group.

The pursed-lip sense of importance, the shock at mention of fibbing, combine with enthusiasm over her accomplishment (all these people can do something) - shinning up lamp-posts.

And Terence Wilton's strongman is a superbly sustained performance. There's a feeling of trying-out his worth apart from the troupe, lifting confessional and pulpit in contest with the weight of religion, or the world that opposes him. Wilton shows somebody perpetually proving more to himself than to anyone else.

While Declan Brogan expresses the contrasting disruptive sense Francisco brings - the other pair can't even eat fish and chips uninterrupted - his long scene with Harry lacks the luminosity there's been elsewhere. Maybe it's the briskness and conflict he's introduced, but there's a sense of a script being dramatised rather than a life being lived.

And the speed brings a lack of differentiation to the dialogue which makes the sudden injection of back-story harder to follow.

Still, this piece bears out a title already used in the Exchange Studio this season, for its Robert Holman double; the tight, incisive script and often intense performances Murray obtains are quietly making noise, the coherent sound of individual suffering and survival.

Harry: Terence Wilton
Monsignor: John Watts
Maudie: Rachel Brogan
Francisco: Declan Brogan

Director: Jacob Murray
Designer: Di Seymour
Lighting: Mark Distin
Sound: Pete Rice
Fight director: Renny Krupinski

2003-11-23 11:11:33