THINGS OF DRY HOURS
Gate Theatre, London W11
Opened 8 March, 2007
**
Some plays do not travel well. It may have nothing to do with their
being too specific in subject or spirit; just some spark somewhere that
fails to ignite. For much of Naomi Wallace's play, I was inwardly
wrestling this point. The story concerns Tice, an unemployed
autodidactic black labourer and leading light in the Communist Party of
Alabama (it is 1932), and his widowed daughter who takes in laundry to
earn a crust for the pair of them. When a white man begs for refuge
after, he claims, having murdered a foreman at the hated Tennessee Coal
& Iron, it is uncertain whether or not he is a snitch for the
company. It is, though, perfectly clear that, whatever else happens,
Tice will preach to him from at least one of his two books (the Bible
and The Communist Manifesto),
and daughter Cali's forswearance of male companionship will be sorely
tested.
Southern Black Communism is a neglected part of American history, and
utterly unfamiliar to almost all Britons. Does it matter, then, that
Britain's labour, racial and workers' self-improvement histories are
radically different from those of the American South? Of course not,
any more than it does when watching Chekhov that most of us do not
inhabit dilapidated country estates and dream of going to Moscow. In
the end the problem with Things Of
Dry Hours is simply that there is too much of it. It is not just
a question of its two and a half hour duration, during which things
move slowly if at all. Wallace's writing is dense and poetic and she
becomes here almost a Dixie Howard Barker: virtually every line is
about Something Big, and usually couched in symbolism rather than
outright statement. (Tice, when preaching, shows a near-monomania with
the imagery of apples.) Or was the preview performance I attended below
par? I think not: director Raz Shaw attends well to visual and verbal
atmosphere alike, and at least two of the three performances – Colin
McFarlane as Tice and Lorna Brown as Cali – are excellent. Wallace
simply neglects the emotional side of the play, or rather keeps
allowing herself to smother it with the intellectual aspect, which
becomes relentless.
Written for the Financial Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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