THE SMALL THINGS. To 27 February.
London
THE SMALL THINGS
by Enda Walsh
Menier Chocolate Factory 53 Southwark Street SE1 To 27 February 2005
Tue-Sat 8pm Sat & Sun 3.30pm
Runs 1hr No interval
TICKETS: 020 7907 7060
www.menierchocolatefactory.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 13 February
First segment of a 4-part season is demanding and disturbing.This is the opening shot in a four-play season from new writing company Paines Plough. The umbrella title is This Other England' and there are contributions from two Scottish, one English and one Irish-born dramatist. (What did Wales do wrong?) The generous Scottish representation is a return for two Paines Plough directors (artistic director Vicky Featherstone and associate John Tiffany) the company are handing to Scotland's nascent National Theatre.
How This Other England' will pan out is still to be seen, as the company keeps to its touring tradition by producing the other 3 plays first in a far-(from London) flung city: Plymouth, Glasgow and Dundee will each see one of the plays by Philip Ridley, David Greig (whose Pyrenees also visits Watford) and Douglas Maxwell respectively.
To begin, in London only, Enda Walsh provides a brief, static night out with The Small Things, adopting a MAN/WOMAN, all-talk style that can seem an avoidance of dramatic life. (How would it play in Lancashire's Ribble Valley, where the dialect was researched?) Interesting too to see how the play would look staged according to the writer's opening directions, heavy red curtains slowly opening to a drumroll, revealing a Man and Woman. And if, as the script cover says, they were in houses perched on a mountain top.
We actually see a patchwork quilt curtain stretching across the huge width the Menier becomes with a single-sided bank of audience seats. The fateful drumroll we'll keep re-hearing comes live (performer uncredited), before the patchwork drops suddenly, revealing the characters in his-and-hers armchairs, height suggested by spikes raising each chair slightly above the ground. It parallels Featherstone's style, precise but so well-ordered life can seem too brushed-up.
In a play that exploits opposites a talk-piece repeatedly referring to chat, where there's a grimly violent story of people being silenced in a local community a fundamental opposition is between order and chaos. Featherstone's very strong on the first, but the latter goes begging.
With characters marooned on a long, narrow strip of parquet floor, very real yet set in a void, the huge window the writer asks for behind the stage becomes a suspended (again) set-piece definitely on Woman's side. This, along with the armchairs, characters' autobiographical stories and the repeated shrill sound of Man's alarm-clock (both have timepieces), echoes Beckett's Endgame - though that's a hive of activity beside Walsh's play.
Which presents a tough picture, any hint of connection between these childhood friends with their fearful memories being repeatedly squashed. Yet there are moments of optimism, as the cold lighting brightens for a brief, separate dance, and in the closing lines. Val Lilley, every facial feature working full-time, and Bernard Gallagher, a picture of loss or bemusement when not talking, give immaculate performances, at home with the both the formality recurrent in Walsh's syntax and the forceful realism of his vocabulary.
Woman: Valerie Lilley
Man: Bernard Gallagher
Director: Vicky Featherstone
Designer: Neil Warmington
Lighting: Natasha Chivers
Sound: Mat Ort
Voice coach: Ros Steen
2005-02-14 16:16:22