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Orwell classic sounds a dull note 1984 Sell a Door, Uppingham Theatre *** IF ONE thing
impressed
Like On this Orwellian evening, they were marshalling
a large group from the school, Fifth and/or Lower Sixth, keeping a
quiet, unflustered eye on proceedings. The number of actual outsiders,
rural punters like me, was small; but perhaps just as well. Providing an additional service for the burgeoning touring companies whose work, and modest recompense, is vital to young actors setting out, Uppingham was h by an arts-conscious Public School for the community. The greeting team upon arrival was a well-trained,
couth group of Sixth Formers, who have a courteous answer for most
tiresome questions and the kind of competence and precision one would
admire in a school sports team. Their
demeanour and problem-solving were, to put it mildly, impressive.
Sell a Door Theatre, founded in Liverpool and
with Scottish connections, is now based in Both have clocked up considerable directorial
credits. Rowntree, who acted on this occasion (and with, I thought, some
acumen), has directed The History Boys,
Spring Awakening,
Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey; as well as produced
The
Lord of the Flies – it sounds like a bit of a Balthus/Tuke
collection - as well as adapting Cinderella
for Sell a Door
(would the acronym ‘SAD' be a more engaging,
Schmerz-ridden
company name?). Many of these were staged just down the road at the
Greenwich Theatre (the first two you can find recently reviewed here, in
stagings by other companies.)
Hutchinson, who directed SAD's
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Journey's
End, A Christmas Carol,
Dracula, Peter (Stacy Sobieski's new
take on the Peter Llewellyn Davies/Peter Pan story) and Arthur Miller's
seventh play and 1944 flop The Man Who Had all the Luck, and has
had continuing work for Liverpool theatres, took the helm for this
1984.
I wish I could applaud him here, for he is clearly a firebrand
of burgeoning talent and an enabler, something the theatre always
needs. Sell a Door is a supportive set up. Usually one
directs, the other backs up as producer. It really needed both sets of brains here.
1984 is a tough nut to crack; but wholly well-chosen
repertoire to tour round their massive circuit of 31 venues (some with
double performances) - a feat of planning in itself; especially with
1984 often on Examination Boards' syllabi. So why does one blow hot and cold about this?
Because, despite the attempt to stick loyally by Orwell's outline, and a
genuine sense of threat in the air – dark sayings and unpleasant
innuendo certainly help sustain this show – it was almost as if it would
have been better as a radio play. Little of what went on on Hutchinson's
stage – the odd cogent scene apart - did much to enhance, or redouble,
the ghastliness of a world where individuality is drowned and the
official Lie rules nominally unchallenged. OK, we got the message. But
little more. As John Hurt and Richard Burton reminded us, this is a story of the little man up against the hidden oppressor. In some ways, this production jumped through all the right hoops, or a good number of them. Yet it left one breathtakingly unmoved, almost as if Big Brother were manipulating things to ensure so. We only lightly care about Jack Cosgrove's drably
unexciting Winston, someone seemingly too inept to umpire a school
cricket match. One felt little or nothing for Lily Knight's Julia. For
all their efforts, a worthy try, they fade into virtually nothing:
cardboard cutouts one might invite to help out at Sunday School. There
was fire in the belly, it's not as if they weren't trying to smoulder;
but no more than Puff, The Magic Dragon.
Worse than that, it was dull.
None of the extras did much for me, though one
liked the look and feel of George Bryan (Charrington): an American-born
actor who has impacted recently in more than mere walk-on roles (in
The Seagull; or in
Lear and
Antony and Cleopatra, both
for Webber Douglas). But We were lucky that Owen Lindsay played the lordly
turncoat, O'Brien. His interview with Cosgrove's Winston easily produced
one of the evening's best sequences. Irish born and New Zealand raised,
Lindsay had, paradoxically, for his kind are all crooks of a sort, some
of the gravitas, the right mixture of truespeak and gobbledygook that
enabled the character to emerge as almost human. You almost felt he
could garner the authority to run a country, or the CIA or FSB at least.
It's intriguing that he's an accomplished fight director too, for his
presence often induced the feeling of a tryst; of managed verbal games;
he can concoct more than one kind of fight. The play looked up several
notches when Lindsay held the stage.
Just here and there, while others limped along,
let down by an insufficiently cogent, if ritually cardboard, script from
adapter Matthew Dunster - or possibly from Orwell himself - the only
actor, I'm sorry to say, who caught my eye and my attention was company
co-director Phillip Rowntree. Perhaps from his directing experience he
has sufficient armoury of small but meaningful gesture, the integration
of move and spoken line, that I sensed the whiff of an acting talent, in
his role as Parsons: a Big Brother acolyte who quietly has his finger on
the pulse: threatening, endearing, hitting the nub of a wobbly honesty:
able to do paradox, such an asset for a serious actor.
Whether Adrian Gee, six months out of graduation
and designer of half a dozen Sell a Door productions since 2010, plus a
further clutch of Lamda at the Linbury stagings before that, is
responsible for the endless nonsense of stage-setting and resetting we
were pointlessly subjected to, there was scant else visible to suggest
his phenomenally impressive set of programme credits.
True, if one goes for a sinister minimalism, as
the pictures suggest, the designer is left with little more to do than
write himself out of the plot. A case could be made for what we saw, or
didn't see.
But did anyone really deserve a set design
credit, or do right by all those venues of paying punters this SAD show
will visit by its close? Some of the trivial bric-a-brac would have
been ejected by most If there was a concerning lack of focused
direction, all the visual imagination had to come from the audience: it
would seem that was indeed the aim. Still were these the charity shop
production values of the future?
Yet one would love to have seen some of the
daring repertoire Gee has helped resurrect, and see what he did with it:
Seneca's Thyestes (the
Titus Andronicus of Roman theatre);
Stravinsky's neglected ballet with words
Persephone; SAD's own
Spring Awakening and
Comedy of Errors; the Strauss
Intermezzo he assisted on at Buxton Opera House; or Tennessee
Williams's Orpheus Descending at the Royal Exchange.
One's feeling is exactly the same regarding
Hutchinson and his company. It would be impossible to think this dingy,
limping 1984 is typical of a company and director who have
obviously got verve, and an eagerness to tread where British theatre
should be going.
This spring, Anna Fox's production of
Ghosts
for SAD, with a different cast, may have been an entirely different
experience. Equally I can't say, for certain, that this year's
Journey's End wasn't one of the best
‘Sell a Door has gained a reputation as one of
the liveliest theatre companies in the
Touring till Sat 8 June:
Wed 8 May at Arena
Theatre, Mon 13 May at The Theatre, Chipping Norton
7.45 p.m. (01608 642350) Mon 20 May at The Castle, Wellingborough 7.30 p.m. (01933 270007) |
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most about this evening at the theatre, it was the front of house team.
Uppingham Theatre provides for a wide catchment around 
