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A staircase still remembered
In the dark on the stairs: Philip Labey as Sonny Flood. Pictures: Robert Day The Dark at the Top of the Stairs Belgrade Theatre, Coventry
How many of
William Inge's plays are staged in Though, thanks to this admirably spirited
production - the Belgrade Theatre under Hamish Glen being so bold and
daring in its repertoire – that is not entirely the case. It was a terrific let-down for a playwright who
had seemed on a par with them all - even Arthur Miller. In the 1950s
Inge won two major prizes or awards (a Pulitzer and a Tony). The Inge was a mid-Westerner – born in Kansas, he
taught in Missouri before his successes on Broadway. Latterly his home
was How far this obliquely colours his work, and his semi-autobiographical discussions of family relations and human tensions, as it did Williams' masterpieces, is harder to say. It only rarely features in his work. The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, which ran to acclaim in 1957, is a reworking of his first play, Farther Off from Heaven, which was written ten years earlier with Tennessee Williams' encouragement. Heavily tinged, like many of Inge's plays, by his own growing up in Independence, Kansas, it is a 1920s story of a dysfunctional family drawn together by economic necessity but splitting at the seams emotionally.
Andrew Whipp plays Rubin Flood, the
simple-minded, testy, prosaically straightforward, bullying and
seemingly womanising father, a travelling salesman (as Inge's was), with
bluster, humourlessness, a seeming incapability to relate to his own
children, and an annoying modern raincoat that restricts his movements
and seems troublingly out of place. It is a compelling performance, if
not quite a persuasive one. Rubin's wife Cora draws the short straw. Caroline
Faber – she has National Theatre experience and RSC too, including
Shakespeare's re-enfranchised Edward III – started almost
disastrously, not being audible even in the intimate studio theatre. She
soon materialised, however, into a substantial performer: mollifying,
patient, put-upon (and, one imagines, beaten for her pains); and
defensive of her all-too threatenable children: 16-year-old Reenie
(Olivia Vinall), shyly blossoming into adulthood; and Sonny (Philip
Labey), not even yet a teenager. The playing of these two youngsters was a joy: in the potentially thankless task of ‘pretending' to be a starry-eyed, Hollywood star-obsessed ten- or twelve-year-old, Labey came not just closeish, but strikingly close, to producing a genuine kiddie (like Bert in All My Sons): excitement and hero-worship written across his face, given to frenetic changes of mood; and by the end, agonised enough, and pitchforked into premature maturity by the oppressive domestic tensions. Inge characterises the children touchingly; and
they yield incident: Reenie's newly-purchased, $19 dress – effectively a
coming-of-age outfit – unleashes the massive parental row, dragging in
not just money (a vital issue in the pre-crash Mid-West) and the
desperate need to make it, but loyalty and fidelity too, which provides
the biggest outburst of the evening. Vinall, slender, delicate,
beautiful, un-savvy, innocent - almost, it might seem, a candidate for
an abused child - ensured that vulnerability was writ large upon the
stage. All were vulnerable; she was apocalyptically so. The other characters bring a mix of salve and
poison. I enjoyed Graham Vanas's sheepishly naïve and submissive husband
(Morris Lacey, a dentist), who quietly sleeps his way through
women-on-women banter and bickering, and probably dozes off pulling
teeth too. For peace of mind, perhaps he should have played
with the hyperactive Sonny, for director Lisa Forrell (who has an
enviable record in bringing to the stage lesser-known repertoire),
despite so much beautifully observed invention, gives Morris precious
little to do; which I suppose suits his character ideally. Being a couch
potato is safe: it avoids conflict. It is the exhaustion and disillusion of family
life, plucked from his One such is the arrival of a potential suitor for
Reenie, the He is honest, agreeable, straight-dealing. Unlike
most onstage, he does not manipulate. Like a kind of angel-figure, he
instils an almost hallowed silence. His subsequent suicide, a few hours
later, conceivably doesn't ring true. Inge has not prepared it enough;
it feels not just astonishing, but inept. Thus a major crux in the play
(coming too soon after the interval, it turned out) was a damp squib. We
didn't feel ‘Oh, I see now; I didn't read the signs.' There were none.
One who adores manipulating – or at least being
centre of the show – was Reenie's friend, the splendidly-named Flirt.
Flirt can do anything – as long as she's the centre of attention. This
Jenny-May Darcy achieves brilliantly. She twirls and twiddles, pouts and
preens, wangles and witters, controls who does what, and (albeit not
quite up to Vinall's teenager) is genuinely beautiful. Does she steal the show? Well, jolly nearly,
because she is so effective, and entrancing, onstage (and designer Ruari
Murchison's costume designs – and wig – did Darcy proud). Amid the
tension, she furnished the fun. So did Jessica Martin's nicely acidic
aunt – Lottie Lacey, the dentist's wife and Cora Faber's sister, who
deployed a delicious range of subtly varied rapier thrusts –
mock-charming, posy, needling, acidic, ultimately viperish. Her red
costume gave her a diabolic touch; not unaptly. But it is her sister, Cora, on whom the weight of
responsibility, and the moral onus, falls. The play will end with
reconciliation, but there is perhaps some shortage of justification: it
is clear that, despite all, she loves Rubin; but Inge, it could be
argued, simply does not give us, her loyalty and the formal traditions
of the era apart, sufficient marital data about this relationship to
see the sense of this. There is just a whiff of immaturity in this,
still in essence his first play. The inevitability of the group dynamics
one finds in, say, Death of a Salesman or The Glass Menagerie,
is arguably not there. This may be because Inge is passionate about
giving us ordinary, real people, without as it were poetically stylising
them, as Miller does, so brilliantly and succinctly, with Eddie Carbone
or Joe Keller. Inge's explosions are affecting, but not gut-wrenching;
in fact, not Ibsen. Cora fights her corner. It is when roused, loudly
reproachful, fuming that Caroline Faber scores most strongly. Passive,
she occasionally loses momentum; assertive, she gains it. But her
performance, like Vinall's, had depths; and as a result, the entire cast
were enmeshed in something deeper, as a whole, than the mere sum of its
parts. Forrell's use of exits and entrances was marginally plain: one
exit looked, or felt, like an unfinished lobby, the delayed, messy exits
it necessitated seeming untidy and perhaps pointless. The room entered at rear gave no inkling of identity: it could have been characterised, the room at the top being also out of sight – eyeless, as it were. The main feature on Ruari Murchison's set (he has a host of provincial and out of London credits, including an RSC Titus Andronicus, a Hamlet at Elsinore and two musicals – West Side Story and The Sound of Music – for Stratford, Ontario) was a giant staircase, soaring above the living room as if to suggest some greater presence or higher authority. It was underused – only Reenie has a short
sequence midway up – but came to gain a limp, loose symbolic force when,
reconciled, and the children gone, Cora and Rubin make their way up at
the close to a night of not tentative but (we take it) ardent, unlit
lovemaking. The only moment, perhaps, when we are really conscious of
dark at the top of the stairs. To 10-11-12
23-10-12
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