WE THAT ARE LEFT. To 5 May.

Watford

WE THAT ARE LEFT
by Gary Owen

Palace Theatre To 5 May 2007
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 3pm & 2 May 2.30pm
Audio-described 5 May 3pm
Captioned 30 April
Post-show discussion 1 May
Runs 2hr One interval

TICKETS: 01923 225671
www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 April

A play not much helped by the theatre.
To say Gary Owen’s new play shouldn’t be on stage is intended as complimentary. Owen has turned confidently from the youth-subjects he’s used since his startling debut Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco. The only youths here are a 1940s airman and his temporary sweetheart, whose scenes intersperse a story of wartime lovers reunited several decades on.

It’s soon clear wartime Ginger and modern senior citizen Ruth are the same person, while the men are different. During the war, she’s attracted to Billy, allowing herself to believe her fiancée may be dead. But he survives, waiting decades before visiting her.

War conditions interact with personal choices to cast a shadow over whole life-spans. It’s perfect material for sound only, where contrasts of young and old voices and a delocalised sense of past and future interacting would be strong. Audience imagination could conjure up characters from suggestions of young energy and elderly stiffness, hope and wearying experience, as imaginative hints rather than the spelled-out physical detail in Brigid Larmour’s production.

And radio would give apter imaginative locations, whereas Hannah Clark’s functional set strands the wartime couple on high for act one, before marooning them on a bare part of the front-stage after the interval.

Without the awkwardly-performed visuals of stage-inebriation, or the need to express youthful wartime physicality when neither script nor production gives the 2 young people very much to do, the story would work far better. As would Owen’s rather uncertain timings. His gradual revelation of the elderly Ruth’s financial position and her drink-problem work well enough. But once the liquid intake’s under control, James’s mental difficulties come on mightily quickly. Time is more helpfully fluid in sound alone.

Still, Gawn Grainger gives James dignity and tact in handling the present-day version of the woman he loves, and Paul Woodson builds skilfully on the not-very-much he’s given, while showing the unreasoning confidence pilots must often have needed.

There’s little to connect Ruth’s two generations. Angela Down has a satisfactory resignation in age, but Amy Hall’s unvaryingly exhortative cadences are generalised and wearing. They’d soon have sorted that out on the air.

Ruth: Angela Down
Ginger: Amy Hall
Billy: Paul Woodson
James: Gawn Grainger

Director: Brigid Larmour
Designer: Hannah Clark
Lighting: James Farncombe
Sound: Jason Barnes
Assistant direct9or: Liz Skelcher

2007-04-30 01:04:58