THIS STORY OF YOURS. To 11 October.
London
THIS STORY OF YOURS
by John Hopkins
New End Theatre To 11 October 2003
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat & Sun 3.30pm
Runs 3hr 5min Two intervals
TICKETS: 020 7794 0022
Review: Timothy Ramsden 18 October
Partially successful revival of a flawed but bruisingly honest script.When London new-writing theatre the Royal Court premiered this play in 1969 they were introducing a new stage dramatist, but one whose fingerprints from TV were were all over the script. This police story of his reflected back to Hopkins' many early episodes of innovative 1960s police series Z Cars - the domestic row in the first act following from the notorious plate-throwing scene that helped smash the cosy police-image left over from fifties television.
And a dysfunctional family had been captured in Hopkins' great TV drama quartet Talking to a Stranger, so this opening act was doubly familiar as his territory.
This first act, with its wife as willing support for her husband no matter how unpleasantly aggressive he grew, itself looked back to attitudes from the previous decade, and the emotional subservience of Alison Porter in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger -,which had been revived the previous year at the Court.
That's not all separating modern mindsets from Hopkins' world. Police procedures have developed: no taped interviews here, and little chance now a mere sergeant would achieve the lone access required to assault and kill a suspect. Given the suspect is a serial child molester and killer, there'd be plenty outside the police station ready to do that. Not here though. This is an hermetic world.
For Hopkins is interested less in the crime - his pretext - than in the mind out of control. It's true of the socially confident, respectable criminal, but even more so of his inquisitor, and eventual murderer. This Story explores the damaged mind and personal hell of a policeman by shifting the order of events, beginning with Anthony Cord's drunken officer returning home in the small hours, after the interview's been followed by an oblivion-seeking binge, to an indulgent wife whose weariness is ultimately marriage-long, and who gets knocked about in a way suggesting either that Johnson's emotionally bruised or that he's a thuggish bruiser with a police job. Time's shifted the balance towards the latter, which doesn't help the play.
Aftera brief central act, putting Johnson in the hotseat, penetrating his failure as a long-serving policeman who's failed to gain promotion, the play finds its tough heart in a substantial final act, where the fateful interview with his mud-spattered suspect is carried out, progressing from initial near-pleasanteries and politeness through growing pressure and sputtering attempts at mental resistance to the ever-clearer threat this policeman offers, climaxing in the final outburst.
By placing this act last, Hopkins ensures the focus is on Johnson's state of being rather than the external consequences of his action.
Though police procedural changes and shifting social attitudes have given the play a dated feel, there's no doubting the continuing immediacy of his journey into the protagonist's neuroses. It's certainly worth reviving, even if Guy Retallack's production is patchy. Cord's sergeant, stuffed with self-defeat at home and work, gives depth to Johnson's emerging loathings, inner-driven and externally-directed.
This story of his strips away falsities as much as his investigation does that of Paul Hamilton's initially confident Baxter. He accepts his ever-more apparently approaching death as a payback for the truth he can't hide.
Stepping in late during rehearsals, Sue Scott Davison is fine as the long-suffering, washed-out yet emotionally hopeful Maureen (though the sock her husband lands on her jaw seems remarkably painless). The problem lies in the briefish central act, where Retallack has directed Christopher Gilling's Chief Inspector as a public-school toff. His dialogue - and Johnson's response to him - suggest the flat-footed , dirty sweat of someone who started out on the beat himself, rather than the manicured office-bound smoothness with which he's played.
Johnson complains about his living-room, over-crowded with furniture, Yet as that cramped space opens out act by act, the final open-space interview-room of Andy Edwards' set makes the point that all the space he craves merely gives Johnson's troubled mind more room to express its destructiveness.
I still await a flawless revival of this play (so far as I know, Hopkins' only stage work). Time's not been entirely kind to it, but there's a raw power underneath the externals which makes it a valuable piece in an age of laid-back and elegant style. Meanwhile, despite the shortcomings, this is a chance to come to close-quarters with the work of a remorseless, rewarding dramatist.
Detective Sergeant Johnson: Anthony Cord
Maureen Johnson: Sue Scott Davison
Kenneth Baxter: Paul Hamilton
Detective Chief Inspector Cartwright: Christopher Gilling
Detective Setgeant Jessard: Keith Horwood
Constable: Alex Grimwood
Director: Guy Retallack
Designer/Costume: Andy Edwards
Lighting: Guy Koretzki
Sound: Shock Productions
Fight director: Paul Benzing
2003-09-21 13:12:02