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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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Reading between the cracks Groping for words
Moorpool Players
Moorpool Hall, Harborne
***** THERE are some nights when the house
lights fade, the curtain rises and everything just seems to click, and
then what follows is a delight. Moorpool have managed that with Sue Townsend’s
sharply observed 1983 comedy about adult illiteracy. It is packed with
laughs yet, a generation on, the problem it highlights, adult
illiteracy, is still a scourge of our society with the figures little
changed from the play’s setting in Thatcher’s Britain. The date is fixed by radio broadcasts with
snippets of news of the time introducing the two acts which are set in a
Clapham primary school in London where Joyce - nice house, university
degrees, married to a successful doctor – is about to start teaching an
evening class for adult literacy. Her marriage of 29 years has become rather
aimless, she and her doctor husband have seemingly drifted apart, and
the class, the first she has ever taken, is an attempt to give her life
some purpose and direction. Laura Bunster gives us a still-attractive,
well-spoken, rather prim, well-meaning woman who, with just six weeks
training as a teacher, wants to change the world, or at least open it up
a a crack for those less fortunate. Then there are her students. There is Thelma,
“Thelma Churchill - no relation”, as if anyone would think there was.
She has come to London from Northampton, and Emma Suffield gives us a
mix of bolshie and vulnerable as the untrained nanny on slave wages. Already exploited by the wealthy Kensington
couple employing her, she has been told to teach their three-year-old
daughter to read ready for a posh prep school and she is terrified her
illiteracy will be discovered and the sack will follow. So Thelma is desperate the learn reading – but
only the outdated Janet and John books, one by one, to keep her one word
ahead of a three year old. She is the only one who admits she cannot read or
write from the beginning and has is a deep seated resentment and anger,
and perhaps even acceptance, at being written off, called backward, slow
and all the rest by her teachers at school.
Mark Earey’s George is from Huddersfield, in
London looking for a job. His wife has run off with another man and gone
with his married daughter to Australia – and he can’t read his
daughter’s letters. His old employer in a hardware store died and the
old ways along with George’s uncomplicated life behind a counter died
with him. The dead boss’s son though modernised the firm; computers and
stock control require literacy so George, so far out of his depth he was
drowning, walked out into the wilderness in despair. Then there is the Jack, or in this case,
Kevin-the-lad, 19, insolent, arrogant and the acting head caretaker
after the incumbent, Horace, was suspended until he can explain why the
bulk of the school’s annual order of cleaning supplies are being stored
in his back bedroom. There is a telling scene at the start when neither George nor Kevin can read notices on the board and both make excuses as to why, excuses the illiterate probably make every day – forgotten glasses, new contact lenses or whatever excuse will suffice. And then Kevin has a permanent hand injury,
prominently bandaged, caused by any manner of fanciful events he makes
up on the spur of the moment, an injury which conveniently prevents him
from being able to write.
Rick Quarmby gives us a sad, outsider of a
figure. The only one of his family with a job, who has been cast adrift
into a hostile world by the suspension of Horace, who might have been a
thief, but was Kevin’s protection. He give the impression he is getting on just fine
and doesn’t need to read or write to carry on with his life. Letters and
forms can be ignored and promotion to head caretaker when Horace is
finally sacked is a mere formality, at least in his world. While George, whose vocabulary is gleaned from
listening to Radio 4, accepts his lot and wants to do something about it
and Thelma lives in fear she will be exposed as the backward person she
was always told she was, Kevin, who shows flashes of aptitude when it
comes to words, rails against society and a system which, in all
honesty, has let him, and Thelma and before them George down. Although he does have some respect for Joyce
which perhaps delineates the division of the classes in one sentence.
"She's a decent women. She's got Marks & Spencer labels all over her." Joyce and Kevin give us the two explosions of
emotion in the play, he at his frustration of a world where he is an
outsider and she at Kevin after he sexually assaults Thelma in a crude,
jokey, lads’ sort of way. As a play it has plenty of laughs as well as some
well mangled words, Thelma declaring that her arrival in this world was
unplanned – “ I was an afterbirth’, she explains. But it also has a lot
of compassion and sympathy for a discarded underclass in society – even
Joyce’s class has been abandoned, forced to sit on tiny chairs in the
crèche, the only room available. A mention here for a clever, simple set, which
gives us the classroom, complete with Wendy house, and caretaker’s
reception desk which are separated effectively by imagination, lighting
and paint colour on the walls. There are plenty of laughs and, apart from
Kevin’s outburst that the likes of middle class Joyce will need to look
out when the revolution comes, there is no hint of politics or
preaching, yet there is an underlying, unspoken indignation, that a
civilised society can abandon illiterates. The play was written by Townsend to give them a
voice, and yes it is the Adrian Mole Sue Townsend who died last year.
She is best known for her nine novels and one play about Adrian Mole but
she wrote six other novels as well as two non-fiction books and 11 other
plays. And it is a strange phenomenon that while GCSE A*
to C passes in English have gone up 30 per cent in the past 10 years the
underlying level of adult illiteracy has remained unchanged. Latest estimates put the number of functionally
illiterate adults in Britain at between six and eight million and of
those up to three million are, for all practical purposes, totally
illiterate. All of which, sadly, makes Moorpool’s production
as relevant today as it was in 1983. Dan Birch has done a fine job on
his directing debut keeping up a comfortable pace with the help of an
excellent cast who develop an enjoyable and entertaining stage
chemistry. The curtain rose and everything just clicked. To 16-05-15 Roger Clarke
14-05-15 |
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