OUR TOWN
 
Almeida Theatre, London N1
  Opened 17 October, 2014
****

Rupert Goold is known for productions with plenty of bells and whistles, but the latest show he has programmed at the Almeida is all about the simplicity of putting your lips together and blowing. Thornton Wilder wrote his 1938 play to be presented without props or set other than basic chairs, tables and maybe a ladder or two. Director David Cromer (here re-creating his Obie-winning New York production of 2009) takes it as much further as he can. Other than donning undistinguished suits for the wedding in Act Two, his company do not wear costumes to speak of, but take the stage in 21st-century casual clothes rather than those of over a century earlier when Wilder’s play is set. They even use their own accents: in this small, inward-looking New Hampshire town, a Scouse George Gibbs (David Walmsley) weds an East Yorkshire Emily Webb (Laura Elsworthy), while their respective mothers are a Londoner and a Scot.
    
This is not a gratuitous styling decision. Just as Wilder wanted the actors and the play to do the work, not the staging, so Cromer wants to connect as directly as possible. The folksy insights and homespun wisdom about life and death should come from our folk, our homes. The sole and paradoxical exception to this is the character of the Stage Manager, who narrates and orchestrates the action throughout. In this role, Cromer has cast an American, albeit one from Illinois rather than New England: himself. It’s both modest (the director playing a stage manager) and immodest (he literally takes centre stage much of the time), but again, it works, because the one thing Cromer does not do is indulge himself. He purposely throws away almost every line, even (especially?) the ones about the eternal and the infinite. Life, he suggests, is casual, something that just happens to us, and yet it is also everything.
    
The one simple coup de théâtre occurs in the final act when the now-dead Emily revisits a day in her life: an upstage curtain is pulled back to reveal a full set of the Webbs’ kitchen. But this is physically in the distance, beyond all the ordinariness which is the real meat of the matter.
     
Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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