UK Theatre Network

I know for a fact that I’m not the only northern theatre-goer who was so peeved at missing Kevin Spacey’s Richard III at the Old Vic that she went to see him in Horrible Bosses at the cinema as some kind of consolation prize (which it wasn’t).

Well, there are occasional causes for theatrical rejoicing north of the Watford Gap, and this in-the-round production of Edward Albee’s caustic drama is one of them.

Set on the campus of a small American college, the famously booze-fuelled shenanigans of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? take place in the middle of the night after a faculty party.  Although this is New Carthage, the goings-on are straight out of Ancient Rome.  And the classic Greek dramatists would certainly have approved of the preservation of the unities of time and place, as two apparently smug and prosperous middle-class marriages are torn apart in a suburban living-room over the space of three hours.

George Irving gives a subtle and under-stated reading of the hen-pecked cuckold, also named George.  He shambles around like a stooped and bewildered pensioner, but when he lets his mask slip, and we see the look of amused self-satisfaction on his face as he manipulates and tests the other characters, we realise he is as scheming and controlling as any crook-backed Plantagenet king.  And his symbolic click of the fingers as he casually kills a number of inconvenient off-stage characters illuminates aspects of the play I’d never noticed before.

Octagon regular Kieran Hill is fresh-faced and naïve as Nick, the new biology lecturer, but I missed the sense of the power in the room shifting  when he challenges George in Act 2.  However I loved Tammy Joelle as Honey, Nick’s infantile little wifey, whose quiet descent into drunken existentialism is done with absolute truth and conviction.

Margot Leicester is brave and exposed, in all senses of the word, as the gin-soaked, barely-dressed Martha.  With her lack of vanity, and a surprising absence of malice, she makes Albee’s iconic character less of a monster and more of a disappointed wife than usual.  This is the third time George Irving and Margot Leicester have teamed up at the Octagon and this is their best outing yet, as his mastery of Albee’s speech patterns and her extreme naturalism exploit the text’s potential to the full.

Mick Hughes’s lighting is surprisingly bright, as if the house were trying to push back the boundaries of the night.  As a result the audience is partially illuminated and becomes drawn into the action - an alarming experience when you’re already so close to these social atrocities.

Patrick Connellan’s recreation of a Sixties living room is nicely done and, more importantly, unobtrusive.  I loved the sly touch that although George’s bar is well-stocked with bottles, decanters, glasses and ice, it doesn’t include a single mixer; not even a soda siphon.

Director David Thacker hasn’t gone for a conventionally grandstanding, over-the-top reading of the play, but he uses the intimacy of the Octagon’s main stage to mine the work’s oppressive limitations and show its subtleties in detail.  It’s also very, very funny.

With a true classic of the drama, a magnificent cast on top form, and a first-class production like this, who needs the West End?


Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is on at Bolton Octagon until Saturday 15 October 2011
Tickets: from £9.50
Performances Mon-Sat
Eves @ 7.30
Matinees @ 2pm
Box Office: 01204 520661
www.octagonbolton.co.uk

David Thacker’s artistic directorship at Bolton Octagon continues with Ghosts, featuring four actors from his previous production of All My Sons.

Ibsen’s 1881 play, with its themes of adultery, incest, venereal infection and moral hypocrisy was considered scandalous in its day, and is still pretty hot stuff over a century later.

Wealthy widow Mrs Alving has built an orphanage in memory of her late husband, and old family friend Pastor Manders has come to finalise the arrangements before the grand opening.  With the Alvings’ artist son Oswald just returned from Paris, the scene is set for a happy domestic interlude.  However Mrs Alving’s apparently comfortable home-life is about to be revealed as a whited sepulchre, hiding secrets which have the power to destroy all that is dearest to her.

The programme records the great lengths director David Thacker, translator Erik Skuggevik and the whole cast and have gone to in order to develop the script for a freshly minted “Lancashire version” of Ghosts.  However anyone expecting some resemblance to a Blake Morrison/Northern Broadsides collaboration will be disappointed, with not much specifically localised apart from a servant remarking “bloody hell” and “bugger”; nevertheless it is an admirably clear reading of the text.

I don’t think I have ever seen anyone look as at home or relaxed on stage as Margot Leicester, whose Mrs Alving practically curls up like a kitten and purrs at Pastor Manders, her frisky youth still all too evident to the straight-laced priest.

George Irving as Pastor Manders, a man who has ever but slenderly known himself let alone anybody else, convincingly portrays the gullible cleric and subtly mines the character’s inadvertent comedy in Act 2. 

Oscar Pearce’s bohemian Oswald makes an astonishing impact on his first entrance, the crumpled white linen suit and red waistcoat a huge contrast with the dark repressed world of his northern homeland, and the character’s gradual decline through the play is deeply touching.

If there is a flaw in this production it is the large table which sits in the middle of the tiny in-the-round space, creating a barrier between the actors as they play out powerful confrontations, dramatic confessions and heartbreaking revelations.  But overall the intimacy of the venue and the intensity of the piece overcome this obstacle to create a unique theatrical experience.

 

Ghosts is on at Bolton Octagon until Saturday 21 November 2009

Tickets: from £9.00

Evenings: Mon-Sat at 7.30pm

Matinees: Fri 30 and Sat 31 October, Mon 2, Wed 11 and Sat 14 Nov @ 2pm

Box Office: 01204 520661

www.octagonbolton.co.uk

 

Special event on Sat 14 November @ 10am - Investigate: Who Needs Translators?

The process of translating plays is investigated by director David Thacker, translator Erik Skuggevik and the actors from Ghosts, alongside playwrights working today and scholars including Brid Andrews of the University of Bolton.

Tickets: £5 for workshop, £15 including matinee ticket

 

 

Arthur Miller’s 1947 masterpiece All My Sons begins as a family drama, turns into a detective story, and ends as a Greek tragedy.

We’re in the back yard of a typical middle-American home a couple of years after the Second World War.  For the prosperous householder and paterfamilias, Joe Keller, the conflict was merely an opportunity to grow his small manufacturing business into a little gold-mine supplying engine parts for the army’s aeroplanes.  For his sons Chris and Larry, who piloted those planes, the war was about making the kind of self-sacrifice that would build a better world.  Now Chris is suffering an existentialist angst, realising that for most of his countrymen the war had no meaning and nothing has changed; while Larry is missing presumed dead, his plane having disappeared off the Chinese coast three years before. 

The uneasy status quo is shaken with the arrival of their former neighbour, Ann, Larry’s one-time girlfriend and now Chris’s intended bride; but his mother Kate opposes what would amount to the final acknowledgement of her other son’s death.  Over three acts and less than 24 hours the play peels back the half-buried war-time scandal surrounding the family firm and its link with Ann’s father and Larry’s accident.

David Thacker, the Octagon’s incoming artistic director, has chosen to open the new regime in Bolton with his specialist subject, Arthur Miller.  Thacker’s personal relationship with the playwright is well-documented, and his record for producing Miller’s plays in this country is second to none - indeed my own first exposure to professional theatre was his production of A View from the Bridge at The Young Vic, a space very similar to the Octagon. 

Although I’ve seen the Octagon in-the-round before, the playing area has never felt so close and immediate.  The tiny stage is denuded bar the most basic of props (in the way of a handful of tables and chairs), but in Patrick Connellan’s stunning design the floor is transparent colourless glass which reveals a forest of wooden joists buried in sand, representing the shaky foundations of the Keller home.

George Irving returns to the Octagon after his blinding performance in Shining City two years ago.  He remains faithful to Miller’s description of Joe Keller as “stolid”, but although superficially impassive and unemotional, below the surface there fizzes a James Cagney-esque nervous energy which eventually explodes to shattering effect.   

Margot Leicester, who was so brilliant as the grieving mother in A Conversation at the Royal Exchange, gives a wonderful performance here as a mother in denial about her grief, clucking and fussing around the neighbours in an apparently unselfconscious manner, but constantly on her guard.

Oscar Pearce (Chris) and Vanessa Kirby (Ann) are a fine pairing as the sad but wise young lovers, and Mark Letheren has a great turn as Ann’s flaky brother George, in the typical Elisha Cook Jr role of a little man in a too-big suit.

The four lead members of the cast are returning next month in David Thacker’s Lancashire-set production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, again with Patrick Connellan designing, so it will be fascinating to watch this talented team take on another classic domestic tragedy.

 

All My Sons is on at Bolton Octagon until Saturday 24 October 2009

Tickets: from £9.00

Evenings: Mon-Sat at 7.30pm

Matinees: Friday 2, Saturday 3, Monday 5, Wednesday 7 October and Sat 17 Oct @ 2pm

Box Office: 01204 520661

www.octagonbolton.co.uk

 

Other Octagon events exploring All My Sons:

 

5 October, 5.30-7pm - Les Smith talks to David Thacker about his relationship and work with Arthur Miller (tickets free).

 

14 October, 10am-1pm - David Thacker leads cast members in an investigation of the play (£5).

 

17 October, 10am-1pm - Christopher Bigsby, academic and biographer of Arthur Miller, discusses the playwright (£5).

 

24 October, 2-6pm - Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children will be performed alongside an extract from All My Sons followed by a discussion (tickets free - donations to Medical Aid Gaza).