I
have been a little bored lately by excessively reverential productions
of classic plays. “Reverential” could never be quite the word for a
revival of Edward Bond’s 1965
succès de scandale;
nevertheless, Sean Holmes’ staging has something of the air of a formal
presentation. Before the first scene, furniture is carried on to the
bare stage with ostentatious deliberateness. Holmes is aware that the
play is not quite stuck in its own time, nor yet transferable wholesale
to ours, so he dresses it in a not-quite-period, not-quite-timeless
look. The performance style, too, is not-quite-naturalistic, as if the
performers could do natural delivery perfectly well if they wanted, but
they rather choose to go just off-centre, to keep us always aware of
what is before us. This exaggeration of the banality of Bond’s lines
led me for much of the first hour (of three and a quarter) to wonder
whether the play has not always been a kind of cultural slumming:
sympathising with the dehumanisation of the urban lower class, but
doing so essentially from a distance. (I wonder how it would go down
were the Royal Court, which originally premiered the play, to present
it in their imminent Theatre Local project in Peckham, precisely the
kind of grim district depicted.)
Such doubts about Bond’s perspective are ultimately dismissed by the strength of the piece. If you know one thing about
Saved,
you know that it features a scene in which a group of youths stone to
death a baby in a pram. Nearly half a century on, this remains a
powerful sequence. It does not emerge from thin air as a gratuitous
shock tactic, but is built up as the youths’ initial curiosity about
this creature grows heartless, then abusive and ultimately violent.
When the child’s mother Pam returns afterwards to retrieve it, Lia
Saville shows the detachment and perfunctoriness of the character’s
parenting by burbling away to it without ever bothering to look at it.
Michael
Feast and Susan Brown bide their time, waiting for their respective
moments as Pam’s parents, and Morgan Watkins is paradoxically eloquent
in his portrayal of the inarticulacy of Len, who persists in trying to
find a way forward for himself and the others. The play’s message about
the comprehensive removal of hope and dignity from an entire tier of
society is arguably now even more cogent than when it was written;
however, Holmes’ production pronounces this message rather than making
it live.
Written for the Financial
Times.