By Danny Robins
Directed by Matthew Dunster & Isabel Marr
Set design by Anna Fleischle
Sound Design by Ian Dickinson
Chichester Festival Theatre
Saturday 10th February 2024, 14.30
CAST
Jay McGuinness – Ben
Fiona Wade – Jenny
George Rainsford – Sam
Vera Chok – Lauren
Aaaron Draft, Rachel Morris – ‘company’
The attraction for us was not the many awards it’s garnered, but ‘Directed by Matthew Dunster.’ That was enough to want to see it. It’s on a never-ending tour and we could have seen it in several locations. There are sixteen more theatres after Chichester. A week in each. Chichester is the best physical space, though there is a downside. Touring productions have to perch their platformed set on the vast semi-circular stage, and because of the way it is angled, they did not sell the seats stage left of the set. You wouldn’t have been able to see into the ‘box’ of the set. The rest of the theatre was packed, so there was a loss in ticket sales. It also pushes the actors away from the audience.
When it got all those awards, it was in 2022 for its 2021 London run (Best actress: Lily Allen, Olivier and What’s On Stage awards, Best New Play Olivier Awards & What’s On Stage Awards, Best Sound Design Olivier Awards, Best supporting actor Jake Wood). The London run went on and on, moving through five different West End theatres. This is the touring version. It’s so extensive it has dedicated merch(andise) with logos. They had one cast from September 2023 to December 2023, and have a completely new cast from January 2024. I could list those 4 star and 5 star reviews, but they all date from 2021. There are all new 2024 production photos too.
The programme lists key ghost stories on stage, going backwards from The Woman in Black (another play on constant tour) via The Phantom of The Opera (I hated the Phantom of The Opera) and The Turn of The Screw to Hamlet. The Hamlet entry adds Banquo in Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard III’s victims the night before Bosworth. They missed a major one, Blithe Spirit, perhaps because it’s a comedy.
The play is structured for success. There’s one set, a cast of four, which is ideal for going to the USA where Broadway perfection is a cast of four with two very famous names plus two others. There are also two walk-ons, but in a 16 week tour you need understudies, one male, one female, and the walk-on (police officers) could be handled by just one if they had to put an understudy on.
In a nod to decades of whodunits with French windows at rear centre, (it’s not a whodunit, but it has mystery), the set focuses on a double-glazed patio door, the modern French window. The plot involves the couple, Jenny & Sam, renovating a Victorian house and the first major job was installing the large patio door, which has not yet been plastered around. It reveals a shed behind and there’s a movement activated security light in the back yard, which can be set off by foxes to cause sudden surprise. Our garden is beset by foxes, and after a couple of years here, we disconnected the security lights. Lights suddenly coming on at 3 a.m. (or indeed at 2.22) are disconcerting. I liked the sliding door to the downstairs toilet- a sure sign of something squeezed in where there’s no room for a proper door. It’s a good set, revealing layers of old wallpaper and brick as they have stripped it back to renovate, but it’s set off by their imports … a Trip Trap chair for the baby (we have two still. They’re forty years plus old, and you can adjust them for adults, or to use as steps.) Of course the fridge is in the free-standing shiny metal finish with curves, not white or built-in and rectangular. Two of my kids have those.
I admired the technicalities, especially framing the stage in a red LED light band which is switched on with loud jarring music for time shifts in the plot. It blinds you to movements in the dark behind it, and it will work on open stages and proscenium stages with no need for curtains.
It won awards for sound design. There is a lot – baby alarm with sounds, footsteps upstairs, Alexa switched on and off, foxes howling outside, thunder and lightning, plus the loud effects at time shifts. Everyone has head mics. Again, there’s a minor downside, which is a constant low but audible throbbing buzz, mildly irritating for me, much more irritating for Karen, who wears hearing aids, but in the front row had no need of the theatre loop system. There’s probably just too much ‘live’ in the system. Light feedback? So no, I would praise the sound design’s complexity and timing of its operators, but overall it’s not state of the art.
SHHH! PLEASE DON’T TELL is what the set projection asks at the end, rather as The Mouse Trap has done for seventy-two years.
I’m not going to either. We spoke to people before who were seeing it for their second time, and they revealed nothing except that they wanted to look for plot pointers on the second viewing. We discussed plot pointers in the hour and a bit drive home. In retrospect there are a lot of clues which we failed to pick up at the time. It would be fun seeing it again to see how many more there were.
There is a digital clock over the inner door which resets to the start of each time frame in the play, then counts to the end of the scene.
The characters then, and I guess I’ll leave it there.
Jenny and Sam are the house owners and renovators and are hosting a dinner party. The house belonged to an old couple, and the husband, Frank, had done all the decoration and hand-made the furniture, some of which is still there.
Jenny (Fiona Wade) is the mother of an 11 month old daughter. She was from a devout Catholic family until she met Sam on VSO in Uganda and fell in love while he described the stars to her, and was ‘converted’ to atheism. She’s a primary school teacher on maternity leave. She is the one who heard the strange noises at 2.22 for four nights in a row, always in the baby’s room.
Sam (George Rainsford) is a physicist and a writer, totally dedicated to scientific fact, so a sceptic on ghosts. He’s arrived back late from a trip, so is in jeans while everyone else has dressed for the party.
Lauren (Vera Chok) is an American who was at university with Sam, so an old friend. She is a psychotherapist and an alcoholic. The combination reminded me of when I was told my car insurance had a loading because I was an author and scriptwriter. Two reasons, first I might have a famous person beside me in a car which I then crashed, secondly authors are known as drinkers. When I protested (mildly), I was told ‘Medical doctors have exactly the same loading for statistical alcohol use. Psychiatrists are higher.’
Ben (Jay McGuinness) is Lauren’s new partner. He’s a genuine East Ender in a bright blue suit and moccasins with no apparent socks. He’s a builder. He also has much to say on gentrification, and the lack of respect the newcomers have for the people who used to live there. However, Ben has his own stories about ghosts, and has been on vigils in haunted houses, much to Sam’s disgust. Ben also knows how to conduct a seance. He pins Sam on what I call the Nigel Kennedy syndrome, a bad habit of public school-educated posh people trying to be Estuary:
Ben: Something about the way people like him say ‘mate’- like they’re on a fucking Safari, trying to fit in with the natives.
It’s annoyed me for years too. From then on, Ben addresses Sam emphatically as ‘mate.’ You can almost hear the inverted commas. It’s interesting. When I worked at Anglo-Continental School of English, we addressed our Directors of Studies by first names, but we always addressed the caretaker, gardener and handyman as ‘Mr …’. They would have considered it patronizing to use first names, worst of all would be to call them ‘mate.’
Yes, I bought the play text. I only do that when I want to re-read it. Yes, it was part of the merchandise display.
In the interval, Karen said all four were incredibly convincing, and so for her they’d all have been dinner party guests from hell. She would have made her excuses and left. We both had a minor gripe on Vera Chok’s accent. The text says she’s Californian. So she goes for the female Californian accent – not LA or San Francisco, but central valley, aka Valley Girl. She does it well enough, but the required high pitch didn’t help clarity. Also she doesn’t do it perfectly. Our daughter-in-law is from Sacramento and has the classic California female accent. So we have a family connection. She didn’t have much chance of getting it right for us. I’ve never heard anyone from outside Dorset (where I live) get Dorset right either.
No wonder the play continues to run. It’s very good, and the ever-changing cast only goes to prove the depth of the well of acting talent in British theatre. It’s also conventional (plus all the latest light and sound stuff). I like that. I like French windows even when they’re patio doors. I was in whodunits at youth club. I went to Butlins twice with a friend and the Redcoats did a whodunit and a farce alternately through the week. I preferred seeing them repeated to being threatened in the bars. I mentioned this to Karen, who said (acidly, I felt) that the Redcoats had clearly inspired my own acting style. It is excitingly hair raising, though never gory or gruesome.
****
CRITICS – I don’t think it’s worth listing the five London runs or the 2023 tour reviews.
MATTHEW DUNSTER (Director)
The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh, 2023 (with Lily Allen)
Shirley Valentine, Duke of York’s 2023
True West, by Sam Shephard, West End, 2018
A Very Very Very Dark Matter, Martin McDonagh, Bridge Theatre 2018
Much Ado About Nothing, Globe, 2017
Plastic, by Marius von Mayenberg, Bath, 2017
Imogen (Cymbeline Renamed and Reclaimed) – Globe 2016
Hangmen, by Martin McDonagh, Royal Court 2015
Love’s Sacrifice by John Ford, RSC 2015
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