WE'RE STRANGERS HERE. To 11 June.
Eye
WERE STRANGERS HERE
by Eric Chappell
Eye Theatre To 11 June 2005
Tue-Sat 9pm Mat Sat 4m
Runs 1hr 55min One interval
TICKETS: 01379 870519
01449 676800 (credit card bookings)
boxoffice@eyetheatre.freeserve.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 June
Children of the forties at unease in the sixties.This play came to the stage in 2003 after a life on TV (it was apparently the original of sitcom Duty Free) and radio. It's set in 1967, when Franco was still dictator of Spain, where 2 English couples holiday in the same hotel. It fascinatingly captures members of the wartime generation in married middle-age, still living with ideas formed before the new radicalism kicked in. For all the mention they get here, the sixties might as well not be happening.
Each act investigates a strained marriage, of affluent Robert and Linda then low-paid David, splashing out with wife Amy on his redundancy money (if one aspect doesn't seem true it's the sense of redundancy as commonplace, something that really arrived with the 70s). The two link through David and Linda's interest in each other, though they never meet on stage. Only married couples share a bed to row over; it's the married partners who are the strangers here.
A pair of shoes nicely links the two acts, though Chappell doesn't clearly slot in the phone calls between the rooms something that would have been second-nature with Ayckbourn, for example. And it's the interplay between the hotel bedrooms that gives the play its point.
In John Hickey's production at Eye's enterprising theatre Robert and Linda are thinly-stretched, largely because Chappell so clearly signals Robert as small-minded and reactionary, harking back to the war and gloating over David's poverty. John Brenner plays him with a ferrety eagerness reminiscent of the late Leonard Rossiter (Chappell wrote TV's Rising Damp, exploiting Rossiter's comic style).
Seana Montague suggests Linda's bored sophistication, her facing guardedly registering alarms and evasions as her husband quizzes her. But the payoff comes post-interval when the actors transform into the other unhappy marriage. Brenner's David, far from the holiday adventurer he might be, is a vulnerable figure, Montague's Amy the one on the attack out of frustration rather than malice.
There's a greater feeling for these characters, slightly unbalancing the play though it's in the contrasts the actors create that much interest lies. No great shakes perhaps, but mildly stirring.
Linda/Amy: Seana Montague
Robert/David: John Brenner
Director: John Hickey
Lighting: David Hermon
2005-06-09 11:28:53