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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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Sutton
Arts company is as inspired in its sourcing of new work to perform as it
is in producing it.
Having unearthed the little known gem Mind Games by Anthony Horrowitz last year, this year they have found Visitors, the debut play by Barney Norris. It was first performed
in 2014 and earned him the Critics' Circle Award and Offie Award (The
Off West End Theatre Awards) for Most Promising Playwright. Only twenty
nine years old, Oxford graduate Norris is also a published poet and
novelist. Remarkably his youth has not stopped him from
tackling a story which is ostensibly about dementia and old age, but is
underpinned by an examination of love. Set in a farmhouse on the edge of Salisbury
Plain, Wiltshire, we are introduced to pensioner couple, farmer Arthur,
and Edie, in the home they have lived in throughout their long marriage. They are to enjoy no balmy sunset to their lives,
as Edie’s memory, and health, deteriorate. Carer Kate, with problems of
her own, tries to make things better, awkward son Stephen makes things
worse, as he pushes his parents to sell up and put his mother into a
care home. But this i Norris was inspired by two themes when writing
this play; the love his grandparents had for each other, and the moral
questions raised by the financial collapse of 2008. What do we value?
What really matters? His lyrical prose subtly juxtaposes with the jarring dislocation of dementia, drawing humour and wit, as well as evoking poignancy and lament. The beautiful Wiltshire countryside is an ever
present and tranquil backdrop to Edie’s developing dementia. A holiday on the Dorset coast is meticulously and fondly recreated, a memory of love, happiness and moment, the image of a white wedding dress cascading like champagne over a waterfall quite exquisite. Things which cannot be bought, and can never be
lost. Individualism is eschewed in favour of self-sacrifice, and
sharing. Edie and Arthur’s generation preceded the “greed
is good” era with Arthur working the land, and material possessions
secondary to their lives. As such their story is, in part, a snapshot of
a time almost gone, of rural life, and of distances. The distances between birthplace-bound parents
and upwardly mobile offspring, and the distances and silence that
dementia can create. It is also about the value, and joy, of sharing,
and of marriage and of love. As Edie starts to ebb away those virtues are only
thrown into greater relief. Norris boldly examines love beyond lust,
infatuation, longing, meeting, and parting, into the experience of what
loving someone looks like, what it means. Although the temporal virtues
of belonging and permanence fade, a sense of the glory of love takes its
place. Director Barrie Atchison is associated with his
skill at producing farce. Here he demonstrates his grasp of pace in
quite different ways. Silence, gaps, pauses, and distance are all used
to profound effect. His task was not made easy by an absence of stage
directions, props and set scheme by the author, the script being
presented to him almost as a radio play. However, this has afforded him maximum leeway in
putting his own stamp on a production which could be subject to quite
different interpretations. He delivers a drama of beauty, part funny,
part tender, part lament for loss of people and a way of life. A life in
which we are all just “visitors”. Dexter Whitehead plays Stephen with great
sensitivity taking him from thoughtless grasping offspring to a
denouement which garners our sympathy as his fortunes shift. Carer Kate (Kira Mack) injects youthful vitality
into her role, countering Arthur’s experience of working on the land
with her own “woofing” (working on organic farms!). But it is Len
Schofield as Arthur, and Dorothy Goodwin as Edie who are the beating
heart of this production, and as Edie’s physical and mental faculties
fade, so her insight increases, culminating in a beautiful, laconic,
elegiac closing soliloquy, faultlessly and touchingly delivered as the
stage spotlight fell, then dimmed, on her. Visitors
is a hymn to love, and a plea for us to reassess and recalibrate our
lives. It runs till Saturday 19th March. Gary Longden 10-03-16 |
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no depressing two hours watching the misery of others. It is much harder
to write interestingly about happiness than it is about misery, and it
is the former task that Norris succeeds in undertaking.