THE SYRINGA TREE. In Rep to 3 April.

National Theatre

THE SYRINGA TREE
by Pamela Gien

Cottesloe Theatre In rep to 3 April 2002
Rins 1hr 45min No interval

TICKETS 020 7452 3000
Review Timothy Ramsden 12 March

A touching tribute to childhood emotions recollected in a pacy, truthful – and thankfully non self-indulgent - performance.Pamela Gien is Elisabeth, a young white South African child of the 1960s who grows to youth in the mid-seventies, and then to adulthood in America. She also becomes the people in Elisabeth's world: family, neighbours and the Black nanny with whom she has the closest emotional relationship throughout the story. And Elisabeth is clearly enough Pamela Gien.

For six year old Elisabeth in 1963 the after-impact of South Africa's independence from the British commonwealth, with the consequent confirmation of apartheid, passes as lightly as a flight on her swing – the queen should go back to her own country she declares in clear imitation of adult talk around her. Even the warning not to tell their servant is pregnant – a Black child would be sent away to the township – is told with the inconsequential significance of a childhood secret.

Be grateful – this could have become a fairly big budget film. And it would most likely have been fairly successful, its dramatic climaxes tension-heightened by music, stretched-muscle grimaces and fast editing. The Black child's loss, the search for her through hospitals, the climax of her life in the 1976 Soweto riots, would have left emotional exhaustion in their slipstream. It'd be easy, too, to see how the long search for the beloved nanny would have ended up swiping the tear-ducts as Elisabeth's eventually re-united with her.

That's without the tactful understatement of menace as Clova, the friendly unlocked-door farm of Elisabeth's grandparents, is attacked by a freedom-fighter and dear old grandad killed by multiple knife-wounds. And the emotional-milking of how the shame of Black on decent White violence led to nanny's original flight from the family home would have kept a Hollywood cow's udders working all night.

But, put like this, with Ms Gien creating all and everything, in a performance whose smooth transitions do not call attention to the actor's cleverness (while they do portray her skill), there is a touching emotional honesty. It lies in the tight-focus on the growing child's widening perspective and understanding which gives a structure and human scale to events.

And for once, words are at least as powerful as visual images. The Syringa tree, which could be climbed as an escape from invaders into nanny's upper window, doesn't need a camera dwelling on it; its presence is vividly imagined in the spare references of Ms Gien's fluent, coherent story.

Performed by: Pamela Gien

Director: Larry Moss
Designer: Kenneth Foy
Lighting: Jason Kantrowitz
Sound: Tony Suraci

2002-03-15 04:25:04