Peter Viney's Blog

David Storey

Chichester Festival Theatre: Minerva Theatre

Saturday 30th October 2021, 14.45

Directed by Josh Roche

Designed by Sophie Thomas

CAST

Leon Annor- Alfred
Hayley Carmichael – Kathleen
Daniel Cerqueira – Harry
Doña Croll- Marjorie
John Mackay- Jack

Before we start … because start I will …

In 1970 this play received the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Play, and John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson shared the Outstanding Performance Award from the Drama Desk. It was nominated for Tony Awards as Best Play, Best actor, Best actress (Mona Washbourne) and best director (Lindsay Anderson). Jessica Tandy, then Dandy Nicholls was the other female actor. It was then done on TV in 1972.

Fine. On to this year, and Josh Roche’s production has four star reviews all round, including the two that count most for me, The Guardian and The Telegraph. Reviews acclaim the set design, the subtle lighting plot, the direction and the acting.

So … deep breath here … I thought it was a play that was not worthy of reviving at all. We found it almost wholly lacking in theatricality (though the director strove to add some), wholly lacking in plot, and above all such a lost opportunity to discuss mental health (as we now call mental illness) in drama. Karen spent 1970 working in a Psychiatric Clinic. She says she found everything about it completely ‘fake.’ I’ll expand on that later.

Take the time perspective. We are as far away from 1970 in 2021 as 1970 was from 1919. Let that sink in. Let’s add that the play is locked irrevocably to 1970 or thereabouts as Harry and Jack reminisce about World War Two. Some plays cannot escape their era. You can’t see Oscar Wilde done as 1960s or 2020s. For directors and audience, that’s the thing about Shakespeare. You can shift the time frame.

In 1970, I was a theatre enthusiast, but honestly, I would not have gone to see a modern play with Gielgud and Richardson even if I could have afforded it (I would for Shakespeare). I was interested in theatricality – Joe Orton, Peter Barnes, OK, Hair.

The programme says there will be no plot spoilers. Hang on, but there’s no plot. The first thirty minutes or more are two polite, diffident English chaps talking at a table. You gaze at the elaborate garden covering the stage, and muse that it could all be done in a studio theatre with two chairs and a table. Remember Grotowski’s Towards A Poor Theatre? The set is the unpublished response Towards A Very Wealthy Theatre.

Nothing happens … the play was always put in a batch with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Pinter’s No Man’s Land. These two diffident well-spoken chaps say By Jove! and Oh, yes! an inordinate number of times. While I’m watching, I muse that David Storey may have written it specifically for Gielgud and Richardson. Daniel Cerqueria as Harry, and John Mackay as Jack make no attempt to imitate them, and not having seen the original, I’m sure they’re far less mannered, but somehow the spectre hovers over every line. If Storey did not write specifically for them, he surely must have had them in mind as a model. Jack refers to an ever-growing list of remote relatives who vaguely did something or other. Harry claims to be a heating engineer making him the poshest plumber ever seen. They converse about very little indeed.

Later two women appear, Miss Stereotype and Mrs Cliché. Or rather Marjorie (Doña Krull) and Kathleen (Hayley Carmichael). Both performances, as with the men, are remarkably good. It’s the writing that’s so painfully Cor, luv a duck. He don’t’ arf go on, don’t he? They’re livelier than the men, and are more able to communicate with each other, which is a plausible gender distinction.

In the second half we have a fifth patient, Alfred. A strong man who lifts the chairs and tables. He’s basically The Chief in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, a far, far better play about a mental institution. That play was adapted from Ken Kesey’s novel and we saw two different productions of it. Leon Annor as Alfred was a welcome sight here; something to watch! I have a feeling from photos of the 1970 production that the strong man role was a good addition to this production. However, he keeps lifting chairs by one leg, holding them just below the seat. As one who has done Marco in A View From The Bridge, where it’s a plot hinge, that’s easy. The hard bit is lifting the chair by one leg, holding the leg right at the bottom and keeping it steady with the seat parallel to the ground. That’s Marco’s challenge to Eddie Carbone, and the one which Eddie fails. That’s what he should be doing.

We’re supposed to gradually realize that they’re in a mental institution, though without plot spoilers, I think everyone knows that from the adverts for the play. It’s very large, they mention one thousand patients, so state, not private. Kathleen has been sectioned (i.e. committed) for smashing up her home. Marjorie’s in for the third time. Depression. We don’t know about Harry. The women suspect Jack has been sectioned for following and staring at little girls, though he says he’s a voluntary patient. Earlier he says he wanted to be a priest. That was prescient of David Storey in 1970 before so much came out about priests and pedophilia.

We spoke at length on the way home. Karen talked about the psychiatric clinic in 1970. Aversion therapy was still used, electric shock and lobotomies were recent. Mostly patients in an institution would be zombified into silence by the “chemical cosh” – Mandrax. She noted one bit where David Storey was accurate. The patients often pointed into the distance and discussed other people. One woman had her nose half-eaten away. They say that her husband bit it off. Probably not so in 1970. There was a minor epidemic of syphilis, which can take twenty years or more to show up. In 1970, they had several cases at the clinic affecting women whose husbands had contracted it at the end of the war.

Mostly, Karen thought the “fakeness” spoiled the play. The programme points out that Storey suffered from depression and was hospitalized. She was sure that would have been a posh private home (hence the two male characters). On the plus side, the men cry. That would have been a revelation in 1970 when men fought so hard not to cry. I didn’t “believe the dialogue” in the way I do with Harold Pinter. The women were stereotypical but had bonded. The men were achingly diffident. Alfred was silent but a good portrayal. probably schizophrenic.

We also discussed how a powerful play could be set now … though the issues would be anorexia, self-harming, skunk abuse, gender identity. We agreed that a far better play was waiting to be written. One problem would be the chain smoking. We visited a friend’s son who said they all smoked all day, and given that most of them would be on public finance for much of their lives he wryly observed that the government thought encouraging mental patients to smoke would save them money.

Yet again, M27 roadworks were an issue which is doing Chichester Festival Theatre no good … three hours to get to Chichester (the road works were Eastbound), yet one and a quarter hours to get home, Westbound. This is all in the service of the greatly discredited “Smart Motorway”. No one involved was smart at all. The traffic was diverted off the motorway through Fareham, where we stopped at endless traffic lights with nothing coming from the side directions. If you’re going to divert a major motorway through a town, you need to switch off fixed traffic lights and replace them with portable lights reacting to traffic. We’re going to change our Saturday bookings to weekdays in future, just as we had to change evenings to matinees at Chichester because on the M27 they kept closing large sections at 9 pm with long diversions. Now it’s weekends.

We discussed whether this journey had put us in a negative mood. I think not. Instead of having breakfast at our favourite vegetarian restaurant we arrived just in time to be first in the queue for lunch. We always like Chichester. The theatre was extremely careful on masks … I’d say 95% masked plus. A matinee is an older audience profile, and so more careful. Quite a lot of coughing which was off-putting at the start, but the fibres from paper masks accentuate that.

We are regulars at the Minerva. It wasn’t full (though full enough). I would say the applause was muted … ok, an older audience can’t clap so hard, and it’s hard to stagger to the feet for a standing ovation, and no one did. It gets two stars from me. The actors were at least three. I’ll bet that both Cerqueira and Mackay improved on that 1970 production. The director had squeezed every possibility out of the script, the set was stunning (though also Over The Top), I noticed how often the lighting shifted and how subtle it was. Like the Beauty Queen of Leenane before it, the play seems too static, so ill-suited to Chichester’s thrust stage which comes into its own with movement and activity. In the end, for me, this much lauded play is not worth reviving, so that reduces it overall to two stars.

**

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

FIVE STAR

Theatre South East *****

FOUR STAR

The Guardian ****
The Telegraph ****
The Stage ****
What’s On Stage****

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

DANIEL CERQUERIA
Richard III, Almeida, 2016 (Catesby)

JOHN MACKAY
Measure for Measure, Young Vic, 2015 (Lucio)

DOÑA CROLL
All My Sons by Arthur Miller, Talewa Theatre 2015 (Kate Keller)

LEON ANNOR
As You Like It, National Theatre 2015 (Charles the Wrestler)