Plenty
By David Hare
Directed by Kate Hewitt
Designed by Georgia Lowe
Chichester Festival Theatre
Thursday 27th June 2019, 14.30
CAST
Rachael Stirling – Susan Traherne
Rory Keenan – Raymond Brock
with
Michah Balfour – Mick
Alan Booty- Another Frenchman
Anthony Calf- Sir Leonard Darwin
Raphael Desprez- A Frenchman
Gemma Dobson – Louise
Philippe Edwards – John Begley
Yolanda Kettle- Alice Park
Louise Mai Newberry – Mme Aung
Macy Nyman- Dorcas Frey
Nik Sampson – Sir Andrew Charleson
Rupert Young- Codename Lazar
Ozzie Yue – M. Aung
Festival Theatre, left / Minerva Theatre right
We’re right at the end of Chichester’s run. The reason for the number of recent reviews is a knee operation meant keeping May and early June as clear of theatre visits as possible, so they’re all coming together. Late reviews usually mean fewer readers, but then most Chichester plays have a second life in London. Not that any West End theatre could match Chichester’s stage for the set here.
With The Deep Blue Sea playing in the Minerva Theatre fifty yards away, Chichester has a themed “women adversely affected by WW2” mini-season. This play dates from 1978, when David Hare directed it himself, and it was his first major success. It shows its National Theatre origins (money no object) in that it has a number of characters who have very few lines, just a couple of minutes on stage, and they don’t double up either. Chichester made a virtue of this by having the whole lot marching on to do synchronized scene changing throughout.
The stage is transparent (or shiny black if unlit from below). It can have smoke or fog wafting below it. At the back is a curtain of thin strips which scene changers and cast can ripple though or it can be used for projection of large close up faces. Props come on and off in rigorous formation scene shifting. Stage management throughout is 5 star, as is the bare set.
Stage, ripple effect curtain and projection, with Rachael Stirling as Susan.
The play has attracted great actors … Meryl Streep (on film), Kate Blanchett, Rachel Weisz, The central role of Susan Traherne dominates the play, and she is almost never off stage, changing costume stage centre as necessary. Rachael Stirling joins those great actors with her powerful performance.
The plot moves back and forth between 1962 and 1943 … it starts in 1962, with Susan in an unhappy marriage, which is falling apart. She decides to walk away from her husband Brock (who is naked, bloodied and comatose on a mattress in the opening scene) and just hand over the keys to her Kensington house to her friend Alice, as a home for unmarried mothers. We flash back to 1943, to the key scene of her life. She is a Special Operations Executive courier in German-occupied France, waiting for a supply drop. Instead another operative, “Codename Lazare” (Rupert Young) sees her torch signal and parachutes down, and all her terror of the time comes out as she breaks down in tears. A nasty Gaullist tries to steal the dropped items when they arrive minutes later, but they see him off at gunpoint … the gun becomes a motif throughout the play for solving situations. There’s a lot of gabbled French in the scene … I’d say a tad too much for many audiences.
We see-saw through the twenty years. Brussels in 1947. Bohemian Pimlico in the late 1940s. London street in the early 50s. Kensington residence in 1956 for the Suez Crisis. Susan can’t handle the way stuff from her past wells up at various times. The programme explains the high percentage of SoEs (Special Operations Executives) who were captured, tortured by the Gestapo and died in concentration camps. Post-traumatic stress? My dad, who was in the first vehicles driving into Belsen had it most nights of his life – my mum said he suffered horribly from nightmares. I assume stress contributed to his early death in 1966.
There’s a diplomatic / political plot, and a female fertility plot that interweave. One of the key scenes, and it’s wonderfully funny too, is Brussels 1947. She’s off with a married man on a jaunt and he has died in the hotel lobby. Embarrassing? Not really for her. She goes to the embassy and meets two key characters: Brock, the diplomatic secretary and her future husband (Rory Keenan) and Darwin (Antony Calf). I had a friend who worked in our Latin American embassies, and I’ve attended a few embassy functions in far-flung cities. The portrayal is pitch perfect.
Rory Keenan as Brock (I think in 1956)
The interesting thing about Darwin is when we meet him again in 1956, Brock and Susan are married. Darwin is snotty about meeting a Burmese diplomatic couple, uses the word “wogs” and yet is incandescent with rage about the Suez adventure. The recent TV series The Queen had a great deal on this, and that was based on later research, but Hare got it right then. A later scene is Darwin’s funeral. Brock and Susan have come back from Tehran, and she cannot face returning.
Kensington 1956. The party. Burmese couple at the rear. L to R: Brock, Alice, Darwin. Standing Susan.
The other diplomat is a high-ranking Foreign Office official, Sir Andrew Charleson (Nick Sampson) and Susan goes to see him to plead for a better job for Brock. It’s 1962 and he’s been demoted to the team for EEC entry negotiation. The Gaullists back then got their revenge. Hare cannot have known how well that line would ring in 2019. Again, senior civil servant, pinned perfectly.
1962. Susan at the Foreign Office. Right is Sir Andrew. They can’t begin to cope with her emotion
Then there’s the sexuality theme. Susan is free-thinking, Bohemian for 1947, hence the jaunt to Brussels with a married man. Later she wants a baby and asks a mere acquaintance, Mick, to do the duty for her. After two years in his single bed with his mum downstairs, it hasn’t worked. Then when Alice, now a teacher, turns up with her awfully nice but dim (and pregnant) pupil, Dorcas, Susan signs off a cheque of £200 for “the knitting needles.” Alice, who Brock says is promiscuous (or liberated) decides to set up a home for unmarried mothers.
Sarah with Mick, the would-be father
Alice, played by Yolanda Park, is the other major role. Her reactive listening and observation acting is captivating even when smoking a hookah pipe. You can feel her approval or disapproval throughout.
Alice
Gemma Dobson, as Louise, deserves a supporting actress award for bravery. She has to stand naked being painted by Alice as an oak tree. In the play text, she’s lying down except for the full frontal flash as she gets up. As with seeing Brock lying naked at the start, a rapid bit of stage nudity was pretty well compulsory circa 1978. Here she was front on naked throughout. It was exacerbated by a medical emergency in the audience, which meant the stage manager stopping the play and sending the cast off for five minutes in the middle of it. It was handled superbly by theatre staff and cast, as usual (we’ve seen several of these, perhaps due to attending matinees) rewinding about a minute on the retstart. We did wonder about the elaborate leaves on her torso. were they transfers? They didn’t look like a body suit. So did someone have to paint them (and paint them beautifully) on a daily basis? If so, that’s a great deal of time in make-up. I guess matinees mean you use them twice.
On the script, Alice is writing a novel about a rape trial and tells us a sequence from her story. It’s basically an extended joke (What did the rapist say? Too rude to say aloud … write it down, pass it along the jury. 12th juror asleep. Wakes up reads the note, smiles and puts it his pocket / her handbag) and one I knew and told myself in the mid-60s. I think I heard Ken Dodd tell a version a dozen years before David Hare “wrote it.”. I used to use it lighten up lectures on the English legal system in the early 70s and today you could hear the anticipation laughter- most of the audience knew the ending. In Hare’s defence, the character, Alice, claims to have written it, not him, and she has said:
ALICE: Once you start looking it seems most books are copied out of other books. Only it’s called tribute … means it’s nicked.
On facts, they’re off in 1947 to hear a new jazz band at the “101” club, clearly the “100 Club” in Oxford Street. That opened in 1942, but only became the 100 Club in 1964. They’re also motoring off to Eel Pie Island. That started ballroom dancing in the 1920s, so that works, but as a jazz venue it dates from 1956.
1945. Liberation. “Another Frenchman” and susan
In the final scene, the curtains drop, yellow spotlights hit us and Susan is back in 1945, hearing the war has ended,
We liked the production, direction and acting more than we liked the intrinsic play, which I’d imagine came across as much edgier in 1978. I’d say a 5 star production with a 5 star cast of a 4 star play.
Overall: ****
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID:
4 star
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ****
Michael Billington, Guardian ****
Fiona Mountford, The Standard ****
Ian Murray, What’s On Stage ****
3 star
Anne Cox, Stage Review ***
Natasha Tripney, The Stage ***
2 star
Domenic Maxwell, The Times **
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
PLAYS BY DAVID HARE
Peter Gynt, by David Hare after Henrik Ibsen, National Theatre, 201
Racing Demon, Bath 2017
Skylight West End
Plenty, Chichester 2019
Platonov Chichester 2015
Ivanov Chichester 2015
The Seagull Chichester 2015
RACHAEL STIRLING
The Winter’s Tale – Wanamaker Playhouse, 2016
RORY KEENAN
A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, 2018
ANTHONY CALF
Racing Demon, Bath 2017
For Services Rendered, Somerset Maugham, Chichester Minerva
YOLANDA KETTLE
For Services Rendered, Somerset Maugham, Chichester Minerva
NICK SAMPSON
Ross by Terence Rattigan, Chichester Festival Theatre 2016