UNDER THE BLUE SKY. To 3 November.

Keswick.

UNDER THE BLUE SKY
by David Eldridge.

Theatre By The Lake In rept to 3 November 2007.
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat 18 Oct 2pm.
Runs 1hr 55min No interval.

TICKETS: 017687 7441.
www.theatrebythelake.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 August.

Valuable revival with variable performances.
David Eldridge’s fine play, premiered 7 years ago at London’s Royal Court, might easily have passed-by among the fine dramas expected in each year’s capital crop. But, revived in Keswick’s studio season of love and bile, Eldridge’s play holds up even in company with Edward Albee’s masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a comparison accentuated as the players of Keswick’s Albee protagonists fill the last of Eldridge’s scenes.

His play recalls the structural ingenuity of another of this year’s Theatre By The Lake playwrights, Alan Ayckbourn. Each sustained scene, with its own two characters, ends up contributing to a larger story, the format eventually seeming inevitable. All six characters are teachers, colleagues and lovers. Or haters, for anger, hate and disappointment, as in Albee, counterpoint the desperate search for love. Each scene has a domestic, rather than scholastic, setting. The one bedroom scene, full of initially comic passion becomes the eventual fulcrum of rage and disgust.

There’s a wider sense of progress, for each pair are older than the last, moving from the cruelty of youthful indifference through self-disgust and failure in earlier middle-age to the need to take life in hand before it’s too late. It’s a sense intensified by a fateful reference back to an earlier character, plus a terrorist explosion which happening as the action opens and a story of love from the Great War. All these are presented with dismissive casualness by one or more characters in the egoism of the desires with which humanity muddies life under the blue sky.

Unfortunately the acting’s not all up to the demands of such close-encounter staging. Too many of Ian Forrest’s cast play externally, so a beautiful production moment like the first scene’s end, where loving Helen faces away from us, all attention on Nick, who in turn has his back to her, focused on cooking, has been undercut by acting that lays emotional tones over the script rather than mining character truth within the words. Fortunately, there’s some improvement, Sandra Duncan’s Anna being especially moving in her account of war-torn love in the final, cumulative scene.

Anne: Sandra Duncan.
Nick: Nicholas Goode.
Helen: Michelle Long.
Robert: Peter Macqueen.
Michelle: Heather Phoenix.
Graham: Andrew Whitehead.

Director: Ian Forrest.
Designer: Sakina Karimjee.
Lighting: Pete Bull.
Sound: Matt Hall.
Fight director: Kate Waters.

2007-08-28 14:35:06