HOW THE OTHER HALF
LOVES / VICTORY / EXITS AND ENTRANCES / TRUTH IN TRANSLATION
Various venues, Bath / Edinburgh
August, 2007
**** / *** / ** / ***
Here in one afternoon-plus-evening press-day package is all the
astuteness that Peter Hall displays in programming his Bath summer
seasons. For the matinee, the British premiere of a recent play by
Athol Fugard suggests continuing political and intellectual engagement,
and if that doesn't work it stars the venerable Richard Johnson. (A
younger co-actor of his in a previous production once confided to me in
awe, "I can't believe I'm working with a man who was married to Kim Novak!") In the
evening, an early hit by the country's most produced living playwright,
and by some reckonings even ahead of Shakespeare: Alan Ayckbourn.
Of course that is an overly reductive summation. For instance, it
surprised me to see how even as early in Ayckbourn's playwriting career
as 1969 he combined his talent for laughter with an unblinking eye at
some of the everyday deceptions and tortures we put each other through.
None of the three suburban couples here is doing more than rubbing
tolerably along, and when they become entangled in a knot of
misunderstandings about an extra-marital affair, it is only through the
ambivalent charity of Ayckbourn the farceur that all three marriages
survive. There are moments of outright domestic violence which were
surely no less shocking forty years ago than they are today. And yet
the laughs come easily, and they are no betrayal of the material.
A large part of the delight is supplied by Ayckbourn's characteristic
Heath Robinson approach to dramatic structure: he takes a play apart
then puts it back together in an unorthodox but fascinating shape.
Here, two couples' living rooms occupy the same space on stage; Paul
Farnsworth's design sets bourgeois tastefulness cheek by jowl with
period kitsch, as actors tread the same boards at the same time,
unaware of each other. The highlight comes in a dual dinner-party
scene: two venues, two successive evenings, but played simultaneously
and with the same pair of guests at each, swivelling between stilted
chat over swanky avocado and marital bile which leads to poor William
(Paul Kemp, who has become a first-rank actor of Ayckbourn) wearing a
tureenful of inedible soup. Nicholas le Prevost is magnificently
absent-minded as Frank, responding to a succinct explanation of a
plumbing problem, "U-bend," with a bemused "Do I?" As his wife Fiona,
Marsha Fitzalan rekindles some of the insatiability she displayed in
the TV comedy The New Statesman.
Alan Strachan's production is as efficient as ever, but it is the
toughness and durability of the play itself that carries the day.
Athol Fugard's Victory is one
of those plays that never quite grip either as dramas in themselves or
as sufficiently weighty metaphors. A couple of coloured South African
teenagers break into the house of a retired white teacher, the former
master of the girl's now-dead mother. When he surprises them, the
hot-headed young man takes him hostage; teacher Lionel continues to try
to talk things out with each of them, but we know matters cannot end
well. Vicky – Victoria, born at the time of Nelson Mandela's release
and named for the sense of triumph at that time – sums up the
continuing privations of many in the rainbow nation: "Because we got no
hope, we don't care." But nor do we, much, for symbols sketched in to
fill a bare hour of stage time. Nevertheless, Victory is a more satisfying work
than another Fugard premiere, Exits
And Entrances, currently playing on the Edinburgh Fringe. It is
an overly formalised two-hander between "The Playwright", clearly a
myself-when-young character, and an ageing Afrikaner actor-laddie to
whom this surrogate Fugard acts as dresser in 1956 and antagonist five
years later. The two characters spend more time setting up each other's
monologic set pieces than they do in genuine dialogue, and the American
actors' SA accents are rickety at best.
A more satisfying examination of the difficulties of "new South
Africa", although still not without its problems, is Truth In Translation, also on show
in Edinburgh. This is a complex portrait of the stresses faced by the
team of interpreters working for the country's Truth and Reconciliation
Commission in the 1990s, required to translate harrowing testimony and
callous unconcern alike and yet never to engage emotionally. A clutch
of songs, sometimes seemingly inappropriate, sometimes heart-rending,
have been provided by the legendary Hugh Masekela.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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