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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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Bugger all
to enjoy here
Under Milk Wood
Loft Theatre Company, Leamington
*****
I have said it before, and in these pages will venture it again:
the Loft Theatre Company in Leamington does not just
approach
professional standards; in certain of its productions, possibly a large
proportion, it is - to my mind - as good as professional. Its depth
of team and its casting around for local Warwickshire talent mean that
it has actors, many of whom (as their CVs will attest) have appeared for
the company over many years. Others are new – very fresh- discoveries.
Some youngsters. The behind stage work, the
preliminary sketching, the thinking behind, the scheduling of rehearsal,
the work on individuals, the administrative backup, appear second to
none. Their repertoire is challenging; and by God they can act. It’s easy to enjoy amateur
theatre for what it is – a clutter of spirited local thesps rolling up
their sleeves and having a go. But south Warwickshire drama is not a
case of Karaoke. With Kenilworth’s dependable Talisman, the improved
Priory, arguably
I recently praised, in a few
brief words, Steve Smith’s staging of The History Boys at the
Loft: the set wasn’t much (what Leeds-Sheffield classroom is?) but the
vigour, energy and intelligence of the staging shone and the cast
without exception excelled. I hope I shall have an equal chance to
enthuse about Smith’s Privates on Parade, which runs alongside
the Leam from 9-19 July. Two of that cast were vital to
Artistic Director Tim Willis’s current production for the Loft of Dylan
Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: Phil Reynolds, who made a triumphant,
emotive job of Hector, the Richard Griffiths role, and who here proved
dottier than all the inhabitants of Llaregub (‘Buggerall’) put together,
not just as the Reverend Eli Jenkins, wonderfully decanting his verse
from a pulpit balcony (Richard Moore’s set for the diminutive Welsh
village, right down to the pink walls alluded to in the text, was
masterly; with almost unforgiveable economy and insight he delivered a
medley of lintels and balustrades, almost visceral grey-painted brick,
different sized doorways and seaside clutter, splendid to light,
atmospheric to perform on); but as delicious Willy Nilly,
The other History Boys
veteran was Sue Moore, the alternate narrator (Second Voice), who
managed such a commanding, and different, Miss Lintott (‘My nickname’s
Totty; slightly ironic, don’t you think?’) from Frances de la Tour’s.
She will direct Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at the Loft in June, and
her pedigree includes Gertrude in Hamlet, the ineluctable Miss
Shepherd in another Bennett play, The Lady in the Van, and the
Coral Browne role in Bennett’s Single Spies. She is a strikingly
polished performer, with a winning stage presence, forceful where
needed, who shaped Thomas’s tongue-twisting lines with an appealing
warmth, wit and understanding. The so-called First Voice was
Jeremy Heynes, one of the Loft’s longstanding leads. I would have given
my right arm to see him as the bumbling Simeonov-Pischik in Uncle
Vanya, as Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, or the (‘Well. There it
is.’) Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus, let alone as blinded First Voice serves us up the
whole village, nursed by the River Dewi: the Sailors Arms – the local
Rovers Return - where Gus MacDonald’s Mr. Waldo, Loft debutant Richard
Copperwaite’s Mog Edwards, and David Pinner’s hilariously in-your-face
Cherry Owen cavort; plus Bryan Ferriman’s beautifully sympathetic,
poignant, fading-voiced, touchingly lost, but – like blind moles -
all-ears, Captain Cat, once an avid drinker worldwide, seems not now to
make it along the street. A faint echo of Hugh Griffith, Ferriman was
the Loft’s Porter (in the Scottish Play) and Bottom, but also the
dominant Beggars’ Leader for Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. He seems to wrap all that
experience up for the good, sad Captain, who has a past (‘Oh, my dead
dears’) but little present and seemingly no future. Equalling Peter
O’Toole (in the 1972 Burton-O’Toole film; David Jason was Nogood Boyo)
is as much an achievement as Heynes taking on Richard Burton (the
benchmark recording, as Amid ‘the small town, starless
and bible-black’, ‘the slow, black, crowblack fishingboatbobbing sea’,
and the staggering unfolding imagery (‘the anthracite statues of the
horses sleep in the fields’) Heynes, eschewing Burton’s Welsh burr,
gives us the girls, too, ‘her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body’, or
Of course, it’s all about
death as well as life: even the youngsters in this cavalcade have the
dreaded skull knocking on their doors. ‘O please to keep Thy lovely eye
/ On all poor creatures born to die’, prays Reynold’s rhyming couplet
cleric. Polly Garter (Dawn Morris, gorgeously believable in all her four
roles, tender, havable, innocent then the frosty Mrs. Pugh) seems to
have babies almost as a way of putting off the grim reaper; but her
little Willy Wee, like so many in this charade, is long dead, dead,
dead. Heynes, the village referee,
who affectionately shares with us the naughty bits (‘seventeen and never
been sweet in the grass ho ho’) saves his very best in the closing
stages of this spoken virtual opera, where the evening gloaming gathers
and blinds are drawn (‘The windy town is a hill of windows’), the
cobbles are no longer sunlit cockled and the village feels like a
graveyard that has but briefly woken up. If anything helps Jeremy
Heynes and the entire cast of Under Milk Wood, it is Dave Barclay’s
lighting plot: pinpoint-perfect at every turn. The transitions from
focused spotlight – on Heynes frontstage right, on Mr. and Mrs. Pugh
bickering stage left, gathered up from below with a miraculous sinister
white light (ghostly again), on Ferriman’s mournful Cat’s tragic
yearning for Kate Willis’s Rosie Probert - somehow epitomised by the way
his isolated figure is picked out on his lonely balcony – to a bathed
full stage, the subtle ultramarine that creeps along the street like an
escapee from Hamlet’s ghost scene or Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande,
the fusions of different coloured light to create a welter of different
but specific effects: these are what lend Llaregub its alternately
liberated and spooky atmosphere. We get glimpses of Llareggub
Hill and maybe Donkey Down in the projections on the cyclorama, whether
by Richard Moore or others: some (the sketches) work impressively; the
straight photos slightly lose their oomph with not quite intelligible
repetition; rather it is Moore’s huddled, peopled street front that
holds the attention constantly. Gus MacDonald brings his rich, bluff persona and versatility to another clutch of characters. Already impressive as one of the drowned voices, he’s great fun as Organ Morgan, whose wife can get no joy out of him as Bach’s D minor Toccata and Fugue blazes out of the church. (Phil Spencer’s sound design was rather effective by being restrained; thus the haunting voices of children, when they emerge, were like more ghosts – those of Aberfan, perhaps; the youngest child we see is Zoe Chamberlain’s Gossamer Beynon and Lily Smalls, entertaining Nogood Boyo in the washhouse, as Moore has it, and already on the edge of self-discovery.) Here little ditty: ‘Where you get that smile, Lil? Never you mind, girl. Nobody loves you. That's what you think.’ was charm itself. Abandoning Organ, MacDonald
plots to cut up children and serve up rats and mice (‘Monday, otter.
Tuesday, shrews.’) with equal salivating relish (as Butcher Beynon); and
creates even more of a catchy character out of randy Mr. Waldo, to whom
any age is fair game. (Waldo’s ditty near the end was almost
Shakespearian in its impact here.) Dawn Morris’s Polly, as yearnable
over as her Myfanwy Price (Mog Edward’s dream girl, ‘dressmaker and
sweetshop-keeper’) would do nicely enough, but she is already rolling in
the Wood with half of the rest of the village. If any two actors stood out
for me, reaching a super-class from an ensemble that is without
exception first-class, it was David Pinner and Richard Copperwaite.
Copperwaite’s aching Mog Edwards, and then Sindbad Sailors, fantasising
hopelessly as he polishes the tankards, were creations of astonishing,
touching beauty. How can anyone be so pure, even in He confirmed to perfection
another thing about this cast – the Welsh accents were scintillating,
from everybody, and if they worked up or acquired their own – Tim Willis
may have steered them –
David Pinner trained
professionally as an actor ( His humbled Mr. Pugh, the
henpecked schoolmaster, was the very reverse: outwardly devoted,
blissfully devising poisons the Three Witches would envy to polish off
his ghastly Hausfrau. Then blossoming again with rustic bluntness
as Farmer Utah Watkins. MacDonald, Reynolds and Pinner all shifted
between characters with gorgeous aplomb. And Dawn Morris was a match for
them all. So framed by the effectively
static Heynes, perched on his grandfather’s stool, a voice of lulling
charm, visionary expressiveness, unfettered range and invention, the
Loft’s Under Milk Wood was a treasure: one to set, doubtless,
alongside the new BBC Wales centenary television adaptation. Dylan
Thomas (1914-53) was dead at just turned 39, even before the first More than that. ‘Amateur means
“for the love of”, writes the Loft’s Chairman, Sue Wilkinson; ‘We can be
proud of our true amateur status whilst we produce and perform to the
best professional standards we can.’ Well, as she might hope, no
concessions are needed. The Loft company, here at least, can be judged
on wholly professional standards. And it passed the test easily. If it is ‘one heck of a theatre’ to be part of, as Wilkinson claims, the reasons are more than the companionship of rehearsal and the fun of thespian aspiration. It is because the finished results are - at best, as here - first rate. The result: a top class company, by professional, not just amateur, standards. To 17-05-14 Roderic Dunnett
Betrayal by Harold Pinter runs at the Loft Wed 10-Sat 14 June. Privates on Parade from Wed 9 to Sat 19 July. www.loft-theatre.co.uk |
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the
skittering postman who reads up his charges’ missives as if they were
free on the internet, and lunatic, jabbering Lord Cut Glass with his
clocks. The last was surely a candidate for plum character of this ‘Play
for Voices’ – though Dylan Thomas has come up with nary a dud in the
whole village.
the
women all a-screech and -babble in Morgan’s general shop: Mary
MacDonald’s sniffy, opinionated Mrs. Butcher Beynon and Mrs. Dai Bread 1
(Llareggub folk seem to go in for more than one marriage: doughty Loft
veteran Anne Wood, who with her two dead hubbies, Mr. Ogmore and Mr.
Pritchard (Reynolds and Pinner again) provides, as Mrs. Ogmore
Pritchard, fresh as a daisy, one of the umpteen hoots of the evening.
they managed the extraordinary effect of producing a variety, as if
seaside Llareggub were a crossroads of Cardigan and Carmarthen, Port
Talbot and Monmouth accents (as surely it might be: Mr. Waldo, for
instance, grew up in Pembroke) as much as Istanbul is a medley of
Turkish, Arabic and Balkan. This rich, amusing variety made a massive
difference to the impact of the text.