THREE WOMEN AND A PIANO TUNER. To 3 July.
Chichester
THREE WOMEN AND A PIANO TUNER
by Helen Cooper
Minerva Theatre To 3 July 2004
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.15pm
Audio-described 30 June
Runs 1hr 40min One interval
TICKETS: 01243 781312
www.cft.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 June
Secret family disharmonies heard in an elegantly accomplished play whose smooth surfaces could do with some rough edges.Here's another sisterly trio - Chekhov knew what he was doing, if not what he was starting. Most drama occurs within families. Women express emotions and grievances sooner than a band of brothers. And three allows varied viewpoints, with shifting sympathies. Exploiting these is the most interesting aspect of Helen Cooper's play about the daughters of a viola playing father.
A violinist would have been too showy, a cellist too sensitive. But there are hidden depths to a viola player, tucked away among the strings, filling-in harmonies, occasionally playing plangent tunes, thinking who knows what.
These talented sisters chose separate tracks in life. Choice is mentioned with determined frequency, though behaviour in the play seems determined by the gradually revealed past - an interesting contradiction too little explored.
Ella's musicality has been suppressed until now, her new piano concerto exploring childhood memories. Beth surrendered music for married wealth. Only Liz stuck with it, becoming a celebrity concert pianist. She's the temperamental one, though even compliant Beth reveals an assertive aspect when financing a performance of Ella's composition.
These dynamics, and the loyalty shifts, are the play's most fascinating feature. But the situation seems contrived the romantically remembered lake-isle home, the revelations peeled from Cooper's dramatic onion with practiced regularity, showing the event inspiring the music in a harsher light, and dad as sexual transgressor (a character frequent these days as the heartless landlord of Victorian melodrama).
The three women do a fine job, even with some clunking lines and transitions (try the awkward verbal-shift wrenching abortion into the plot, or Liz's vacuously significant There are so many might-have-been's in everybody's life'.) The revelatory shocks' are of a predictable kind, including those about the piano-tuner. Gareth David-Lloyd gives him a continuous reticence as he symbolically reharmonises the keyboard.
The grand piano is another star of Samuel West's production. At first distantly present, hanging behind Ella's kitchen, it takes centre stage for the rehearsal where all's revealed, backed by piano-wires strung across the stage. Around it, Cooper's elegantly accomplished play is likely to strike someone like Ella's music: excitingly adventurous or predictably accomplished.
Ella: Jane Gurnett
Beth: Suzanne Burden
Liz: Eleanor David
Harold: Gareth David-Lloyd
Director: Samuel West
Designer/Season Installation Designer: Ashley Martin-Davis
Lighting: Peter Mumford
Sound: Scott George
Movement: Michael Ashcroft
Assistant director: Maria Pattinson
2004-06-19 09:58:51