Remembrance Day

What is naturalism now? Naturalism in the nineteenth century was a radical, shocking, formally innovative kind of theatre that brought a scientific perspective to bear on humanity. It introduced innovations in design, acting, writing, directing, attitudes to the audience and to the world. Naturalism now is a kind of lazy default position, without a vision of the world and often suggests a complete disregard of theatrical form; we’re supposed to immerse ourselves entirely in the fictional world and the stuff people are saying and doing. Saying and doing. Naturalism is also a very broad category that suggests no consistent view of the world - there’s nothing like the scientism that is there in all Naturalist writers in the 1880s and 90s. Sometimes it’s not even about doing and only about saying: characters standing or sitting on stage having a debate about things with no real drama happening (e.g. The Vertical Hour). In fact, what seems to distinguish contemporary naturalism is its lack of attention to form, its belief in theatrical form as neutral or transparent, something you look through to get to content.

Remembrance Day is a play by Aleksey Scherbak, a Latvian playwright. This is about the legacy of Latvian fascism. Each year the surviving members of the Latvian Legion (a division of the Waffen-SS), hold a march and are met with increasingly fierce opposition. Anya is a young woman who has become passionate about protesting against fascism and wants to attend the march. Reluctantly, her father Sasha agrees and even paints the banner for her. When he says he will chaperone her she is horrifies and says she’s not going at all. In fact she does and is spotted by her father, who gives an interview to the TV news suggesting that the divisions be put behind us and that we might look at them just as old men. This is broadcast accompanied with editorial comments that paint him as a Nazi-sympathiser. Their door is vandalised and Sveta, Sasha’s wife, loses her job; their son, Lyosha, gets into a fight. The next door neighbour Valdis is a veteran of the Legion and when his friend Paulis has a heart attack, Anya (a would-be medical student) refuses to help. He survives but only because of the intervention of Uncle Misha, a veteran of the Soviet forces. Misha is terrorised out of the flat by the visit of a young Nazi activist. Anya falls out with the family and runs away with Boris, a left-wing activist. They have sex and Boris reveals himself to be a self-regarding bastard, uninterested in the direct action that Anya craves. After he leaves, Anya finds Misha’s old rifle and prepares for war.

The interest of this play lies almost entirely in its content. The form of the play is lumpily uninteresting. The staging is a little more inventive, with scenes overlaid on one another which produces occasional moments of additional resonance. But by and large if you don’t want to think about the legacy of Latvian fascism (and the ways it might parallel your own cultural experience and ideas) you won’t be interested in this play. It’s off-the-peg naturalism, not trying to give you a complex artistic experience. If there’s complexity its in the complexity of our emotional allegiances to the characters in the play, though these seemed to me less complex than the play seemed to think.

Mainly the path that is supposed to take Anya from youthful idealism to mature violent activism is ridiculous. The problem is that she’s so naive all the way through (‘In books people sacrifice their lives for ideas’, ‘I keep thinking I want to sit in Freedom Square and set fire to myself’) that the moment of clarifying disillusionment with Boris doesn’t work. First, Boris is such a cliche it’s hard to get involved in the situation; second, she goes from naive dreaming to naive activism. What’s she actually going to do with that 60-year-old gun?

The play is lumpily written, with some extremely inelegant plotting. The neatness of the legionnaires living next door, one having a heart attack, and Anya being a medical student feels lumpy. It seemed to me bizarre that Sasha’s mild remarks could be editorialised by the television news so harshly. (I know the point is about how humanitarian sentiments don’t survive in a fiercely divided culture but still it seemed a step too far.) I’m not clear why exactly Uncle Misha does a runner. He leaves his keys for Anya, not for any obvious reason except that it gives her somewhere to have sex with Boris in the final scene.

The translation doesn’t help to engage you. There’s something theatrically dead when people are speaking a bad translation. The air doesn’t move; it just seems arid, like we’re watching people gingerly talking about situations rather than acting them. The language is florid and clumsy: why does the young activist use the phrase ‘Your fusspot Christian ideas ... they’re a dead end’. Who under the age of 50 says fusspot? And the rhythms are all wrong. Look at this ‘I never got to finish school. The War got in the way. Stiff competition, getting into medical school. You think you’ll make it?’ Going from ‘in the way’ to ‘stiff competition’ is horrible, like there’s a sentence missing. The actor will be like a train trying to jump a gap in the tracks.

So, while I feel I know more about the history of Latvia and the legacy of fascism and of the Soviet occupation, I didn’t get much out of this as a play. It seems to me a good example of the fag end of contemporary naturalism.

The Holy Rosenbergs

It’s been a learny, huggy week at the National. Rocket to the Moon ended with a middle-aged dentist learning not to take things for granted (okay, it’s a better play than that sounds). The Holy Rosenbergs ends with a North London Jewish father hugging his daughter and promising to make things right.

David and Lesley Rosenberg are caterers. But tomorrow they are burying their son, Danny, who died during service for the Israel Defence Forces. This is the crucible for community tensions; some people plan to picket the funeral, not because they are angry at Danny’s actions, but because they are angry at his sister, Ruth, who has joined a legal team, writing a substantial report on war crimes in the recent conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians. The local rabbi comes to urge her to stay home and sit shiva; the family friend, Saul, says he can’t ask David and Lesley to do the catering at his daughter’s wedding - a contract that would be a lifeline - because it will threaten his position as chairman of his synagogue. When the leader of Ruth’s legal team, Stephen Crossley, appears unexpectedly at the family home, a heated debate ultimately produces some understanding on all sides. But he has brought with him documents which show that Danny was suffering from hallucinations and horror and wanted to come home. It becomes apparent that David, in the final phone call to his son (that he’s been unable to recall), he showed no sympathy, perhaps leading him to his death. Things fall apart and then things come together. The younger son, Jonny, whom David insults, shows understanding and sympathy for his father; Ruth agrees to step down from the report team. David will make things right.

This is a very old-fashioned kind of play in some ways. It’s a debate play, a well-made play, a middle-class domestic melodrama. It mainly unfolds in real time (there’s one ellipsis that means the family have dinner while we have the interval) and entirely in one room. Information is brought into the house by visitors who come and go without care. It has buried family secrets forced out into the open; some characters representing clearly plotted positions in a debate. It’s reminiscent of All My Sons, as some reviews have noted.

Old-fashioned doesn’t mean bad of course (hey, I’m loving the Rattigan revival) and although debate plays aren’t really to my taste, you can change gear and get interested in the debate, if not the drama. In this instance, the play gives a compelling sense of how criticisms of Israel are viewed by some in the Jewish community, as a threat to their own existence, with genocide vividly felt and passed on through folk memory. David tells a story about his father:

I grew up in a block of flats on the sixth floor, but there was a short time when all I wanted was a little dog. I begged my Dad. Begged him. You know what he said to me? He said ... what if we have to leave again? What if they come for us like they did before, like they came for your aunts and uncles and all your cousins, and we have to leave at a moment’s notice? What would we do with the dog? We’d have to leave him behind? No boy, he said, it wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be fair on the dog.

It’s a kind of story that I’ve heard often before (and Pinter says that a feeling of that kind lurks in The Birthday Party). It has a stamp of truth and feeling. On the other hand, Crossley and Ruth’s accounts of why it is important to hold Israel to account for human rights violations are well put, convincing and humane. The play, happily, does not fling the charge of anti-semitism around in a muddying way; it is concerned with issues of justice, but also of how you balance that value with the value of community, whether human rights can be protected when you have your back to the wall, or to the sea. In some ways that leaves Ruth’s decision to step down from the Report group interesting, if not wholly satisfying; if you wanted defiance, justice (let right be done), the play isn’t going to give it to you, because this is a complex situation, requiring compromise and understanding. If anything, the play is, unfashionably, suggesting that in a situation as polarised as the Palestinian conflict, compromise is a radical act.

While I’m being positive, I should say that Henry Goodman gives a wonderful performance. From the moment he appears, unable to sit anywhere for long, restlessly drumming his fingers, it’s a long, sustained, continuous performance that is graceful and moving, an affectionate and sympathetic study of a mind under enormous strain, his buoyancy cracking at times, but being the root of his human spirit. And Ryan Craig wrote the part that let him give that performance, so he deserves at least some of the credit for that major role.

If I had a complaint, it’s that it’s not old-fashioned enough. I never felt very moved by the play and that’s because it’s too concerned with debates, and with telling us how people are feeling, rather than letting us feel it in the way they act with each other, and through structure and subtext. Inevitably, I think of Rattigan and the way he will give us imaginative space to understand someone’s pain by placing them silently in a social situation digesting some awful news (Joan in After the Dance, for example). There’s not enough of that here; people get news and react and we’re just given what we’re given. I didn’t engage with the play on the level of character.

There are some clunky bits of plotting. Ruth rushes out to an all-night chemist but announces that she doesn’t have a key because of the new front door. This implausible idea (who gets one key for a new lock? Why can’t she just ring the bell?) is a way of getting Crossley into the house who wanders in without a by-your-leave. And then he stays, really making himself at home, despite knowing that the family are preparing for a funeral the next day. As written and played, Crossley was an old-school upper-middle class professional and it’s bizarre to think he’d not show more sensitivity. Saul also behaves appallingly. He has to break it to the family that he’s not going to accept their bid to cater his daughter’s wedding. He tells them this the day before the funeral. He really could have waited a week. The very idea that Danny’s body has been brought home seems a little convenient; ‘Danny was an Edgware boy at heart’ doesn’t do it for me, since he’s not too Edgware a boy to fly out to Israel and join its army. These things niggle at the play and give it a sense of artificiality; these characters have been brought together to have a debate - they don’t have a debate because they’ve been brought together.

This sense isn’t helped by some clunky dialogue. Sometimes it’s the exposition firing off but at other times it’s just rather ponderous (‘I’m asking you to find a way to avoid a huge amount of heartache that I’m worried your parents are too fragile to handle at the moment’). There are things I enjoyed about the content - and the performances are mostly very strong - but it’s the sort of play that either needed David Hare’s elegance of expression or Terence Rattigan’s elegance of structure. Preferably both.

Rocket to the Moon

Famously, in the Seinfeld writer’s room was a sign ‘No hugging, no learning’, a necessary corrective to American sitcom’s addiction to redemptive endings. It’s not just the sitcom either; American drama in the mid-century period was often famous for its closing lines that sum up the play and offer a clear statement of the improving message that it’s been trying to convey. This is the way we were. Attention must be paid.

Clifford Odets’s Rocket to the Moon is no different. The journey the hero has to go on is curious but it is plainly meant to deliver a moral to the audience when Ben Stark declares ‘I’ll never take things for granted ever again’.

It’s a simple plot. Dr Stark is a dentist who lacks drive and ambition. His marriage has flatlined, his work barely pays the rent. Then he employs Cleo Singer, a ravishing young woman with whom he begins an affair. He was encouraged in this by his father in law, who is estranged from his daughter. In the event, the father in law falls for Cleo too, as does the rapacious theatre producer Mr Wax. In a final confrontation, she rejects them all and Dr Stark vows never to take anything for granted again.

What’s interesting is to have an essentially passive hero; everyone walks over him, he is hectored by his wife, doctors on the same corridor walk in and out of his waiting room without knocking. He’s offered funding by his father in law to set up a new high-class specialist clinic but he turns it down thinking that half a loaf is better than none. The rocket to the moon of the title is an affair; aged 40, maybe this is a make-or-break moment. Will he settle for his loveless marriage and his middling career or will he change everything, take risks, make something new of his life?

It’s got the same problem as Separate Tables. In the latter, the Major’s offence is to furtively grope women in the cinema. I think we’re inclined to be much less forgiving of him now that audiences would have been in 1954. We’d be likely to think that there might be more to it than groping (check his basement! check under the patio!). Here we are invited to think that having an affair is a bold and sympathetic action. The problem with the play - and with the new National Theatre production - is that it has to persuade us that the marriage really is in a bad way. In fact, in Keeley Hawes’s performance - but also in the text - Belle Stark is a gorgeous, sexy, funny, smart woman who is a little bossy but fundamentally more interesting than Cleo. Cleo is basically a bit of a bimbo (though brilliantly played, full of wit and detail, by Jessica Raine). As a result, the play asks us to take seriously a bored man shagging his bubbly young secretary and therefore cheating on his lovely wife as a supreme act of self-realization. I didn’t really buy that.

I’m not sure Odets had fully decided what sort of play to write. It’s a romance (particularly in Act 2). But it’s also a wisecracking comedy (particularly in Act 1). It’s also a realist drama (particularly in Act 3). There are traces of Odets’s earlier more directly political work in the continual talk of money and in the sensational scene where his fellow dentist Dr Phil Cooper returns having sold his blood for money - and also in the near-agitprop names: Stark, Singer, Wax all suggest something about their attitudes and situations. What I’m hugely understating is how funny the play is; it’s full of laughter, generous and cynical, all in character and often pitching the thing into realms of wonderful absurdity (‘Do you know something? I can’t read Shakespeare - the type is too small’). 

The humour itself causes problems. The father in law is a wisecracking character, full of New York Jewish schtick; but then we have to undergo a crunching gear change as he declares his love for Cleo. To be sure, this gives him perhaps the most heartfelt speech in the play: ‘There are seven fundamental words in life, and one of these is love, and I didn’t have it! And another one is love, and I don’t have it! And the third of these is love, and I shall have it!’ But I remained unmoved by his love for Cleo, which seemed like an old man’s infatuation rather than anything more interesting.

There’s not a whole lot of plot either. The entire first act is set up. The second act only gets interesting when Ben exposes Cleo’s lies about herself, when suddenly, at last, you felt the air move, and here was a play about people with desires and aspirations and delusions and false fronts. The affair itself seems somewhat unconsummated and it’s only the third act where things really seem to matter. The short exchange between Joseph Millson’s Ben and Keeley Hawes’s Belle when she realises about the affair (‘It was only a thing of the moment, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Do you hear me - wasn’t it?’) was beautifully played, tender and awkward, Belle’s assurance momentarily crumbling. Odets’s stage direction says that at this moment Belle is ‘wavering, a spout of water’ and we got that. But even then the act dissolves into a series of conversations, with the cynical doctor Frenchy, with the father, then the decision that Cleo has to make.

And it all adds up to Dr Stark’s epiphany: ‘for an hour my life was in the spotlight... I saw myself clearly, realized who and what I was’ and makes that pledge: ‘I’ll never take things for granted again’. This is the problem with hugging and learning, an awful lot of stress has to be placed on the things peoplesay about what they do. But we know from life that when people promise to change their ways, that’s just words and it’s just the start. It’s their actions we want to see if we’ll believe them. And this case seems particularly suspicious. Is he really never going to take things for granted again? The existence of Kentucky? How about gravity? The airy vapidity of the announcement would, in life, communicate more about the speaker’s immaturity, their windy self-regard, than about any real intentions.

The Catastrophe Trilogy

What happens when you tell a story? What do stories do, in theatre and in our lives? The Catastrophe Trilogy - Alice Bell (2006), Daniel Hit By A Train (2008), and The Festival (2010) - are some kind of an answer. They are the flowering of Lone Twin Theatre, a step away from Lone Twin’s more purely performance and conceptual work and a step towards theatre, or at least towards an engagement with narrative and character. The first and third shows follow singular stories; the middle show presents us with 53 capsule narratives, stories on the edge being story.

It’s a beautiful trio of shows, each one having its own distinctive identity and theatrical language, but with pulses and echoes that ripple across all three. The catastrophes are so different in each show that I wondered whether the title wasn’t a sly joke about the pompous tradition of the playwriterly trilogy (Wesker, Hare, et al.). I strained to find a catastrophe in The Festival (is a missed opportunity catastrophic?) and Daniel Hit By A Train asks rather profound questions about the meaning and possibility of representing catastrophe. Each show is punctuated by songs, often accompanied on the ukulele, and the whole trilogy has a popular-theatre energy.

Alice Bell tells the story of a young woman living in a country divided by a civil war. She is sent away to boarding school but she runs away. She is standing on a bridge when it is bombed by the rebel army but rescued by the bomber. Since Alice is believed to be dead, she changes her name to Clara Day but her identity is revealed when a schoolfriend sees her in the street. She is forced to carry a bomb into town and while she yells at everyone to get out of her way, she is killed in the explosion.

To give the story of this show is partly to miss the point, though. It does have a narrative but it’s also asking questions about narrative, the way that narrative organises a theatrical encounter, the tension between the over-arching narrative and the micronarrative encounters that punctuate our daily lives. The dramaturgy of the show disrupts some of the features of that narrative arc; some features of the story (and of the show) are given to us at the beginning, both in Alice’s early monologue and a strange moment where her brother gets visions of her future (including her singing a country and western song). Soon after Alice becomes Clara, the show hurriedly tells us about her unmasking in an eerie flashforward, moving this narrative turning point ahead of its chronological sequence; the whole story is then recapitulated up to her death in a rousing country and western song played on ukuleles. These have an effect of suppressing our breathless engagement with the twists and turns of the story, while still presenting the story to us as an object to be observed, handled, tested.

There are references to Oxford Street and Denmark Street which would seem to place the action in London, though the civil war and the reference to the bombed bridge suggested to me the old bridge in Mostar, destroyed by Croatian bombardment in 1993. In fact, these accidents of place and time don’t seem especially significant to these stories; time and place were picked up and discarded as required. The bridge in Mostar was a graceful arc and its destruction seemed a resonant echo of the show’s bombardment of its own narrative arc, the fragments of Alice’s story coming apart gracefully under fire.

The show was purposeful fragmented, sections of the story delivered in distinct stylistic sequences. Nicholas - the rebel leader - was introduced as a man who will harm you and he’s given a virtuoso, and very funny, speech where he lists the various people and things he will harm, from Ringo Starr to Eskimos (‘Eskimos, you can run but you can’t hide,’ he warned). Alice’s transformation in Clara Day was effected in a brilliant sequence where Patrick, her lover, trains her to answer questions according to her new personality, the two of them on either side of a table, which danced slowly down the length of the traverse, marking her slow progress from one identity to another. Physical sequences - performers pretending to be dogs, a schoolgirl’s trick with her arms, Alice’s hobbies - were sharp and witty, not difficult, just expressive and smart; sometimes they had emotional pull, as when we see Alice and Patrick’s relationship in him bending forward, supporting Alice who lies sideways across his back.

Daniel Hit By A Train is inspired by the 53 plaques in Postman’s Park in the City of London, commemorating acts of impetuous, doomed courage. Each story is told, usually with the same minimalism as the plaque. The stories begin to collide with each other as the performance goes on some stories told at greater length, the acts seeming sometimes brave, often foolhardy, occasionally comic, often meaningless.

Here narrative is offered in its most minuscule form as fact. We are given bare information: a name, an act - ‘Elizabeth, who died of injuries received in trying to save a child from a runaway horse’ - followed by some tiny physical performance of that act. Often these physical performances are provocatively inarticulate. ‘Here’s me aged 8,’ announces Guy Dartnell taking on the persona of another of our doomed heroes; we watch as he stands doing nothing.

Nothing is what this show is composed of. We know next to nothing about these lives and the company don’t seem to have found out any more. There is no real effort of impersonation. The stage is bare - a sheet of red vinyl, a door frame. Yet, we’re constantly invited to look at things: ‘Here’s me’ say the performers one after another. ‘This is...’ says Paul Gazzola, the ringmaster, introducing his characters, also asking us to ‘regard the drum’ that’s he’s wearing, to ‘regard its power’ as if this power were visible, to regard the burning house, the runaway horse, the sinking ship and all the other unseen forces of late-Victorian destruction. The remnants on Victorian popular culture - bit of melodrama, a fair bit of circus, a lot of music hall - strained through more contemporary pop culture (I was continually and pleasurably reminded of Vic Reeves' Big Night Out) remind us that in a way this is all theatre, which creates vast offstage - and sometimes onstage - worlds with a word or a gesture.

After each mini-performance, the actors gaze steadily at us; it’s a flat look, not inviting, not challenging, not really engaging. It holds out looking as an object to be observed. This whole show is looking at looking.

Because somehow these stories compel us to fill them out. Knowing nothing but the headline, we seem to invest in these stories, flooding the nothing with our own sentiments. And it is sentiments that the show deals in initially, ripe old Victorian sentiments, as in the song ‘Hey Mamma, Me Solomon’ telling the tale of a boy who ‘saved my brother but I could not save myself’. I was struck that the musical language was definitely pre-1920s, from the era before recording, when popular songs had to be instantly memorable, strong melodies, insistent rhythms. To couple these horrible deaths with such nagging jingles is a moral challenge, but the show wants to know why it’s so easy to tell stories, why we so easily want to weep for ‘Elizabeth, who died of injuries received in trying to save a child from a runaway horse’.

This all comes to a head in the (repeated?) representation of a girl who doesn’t want to be saved. (Perhaps the ‘lunatic woman’ at Woolwich Station that Frederick Alfred Croft saved at the cost of his own life.) The entire structure of sentiments - bravery, heroism, failure, saved, help, sacrifice - collapses if there’s someone who doesn’t want to be saved. Is this all just sentiment then? Perhaps, but then it’s also utopian in some way. In a funny but emotional sequence, two-thirds of the way in, Guy Dartnell is a would-be Samaritan, running desperately between rival claimants to his aid, in a frenzied desire to save everybody. (Remember the final episode of series 1 of the new Dr Who when Russell T Davies had Rose absorb the power of the Tardis and come back to bring everyone back to life - ‘everybody lives’ she said, her eyes shining like a god.) The celebration of this heroism is an affirmation of mortality, as if death can be avoided; it can’t, of course, as this show both makes clear and laments.

The Festival follows Jennifer who goes to a music festival at Crescent Point, a place where as a child she was taken, unwillingly, to watch migrating schools of humpbacked whales. This time she fleetingly meets an older man and they agree to meet there next year. She spends the year thinking about this man but doing so has so changed her that when they meet again, she doesn’t wish to take their friendship any further.

This is a step much closer to conventional theatre. There’s even some acting, not all of it ironized or placed in quotation marks. There’s interior psychological space and a sort of set (chairs and tables). This is all deceptive, of course, because in a different way from the first two shows, this too is exploring performance. First, while the story is a good one and holds a certain narrative interest, much of the acting isn’t in any sense naturalistic (the scene in which Jennifer’s mother, a secret smoker, deflects her daughter from coming down to the bottom of the garden is conveyed by Nina Tecklenburg, hopping from foot to foot, percussively delivering her lines between exhalations). Second, there are devices - like omniscient narration, non-realist physical sequences - that partake of different performance traditions. And third, probably the most exhilaratingly memorable moments are where the ensemble recreate the improbable headliners at the music festival: we get U2 singing ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’. Elsewhere there’s a snatch of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ ‘By The Way’, a recreation that cannot in any sense be ‘realistic’, since it calls attention to the iconic non-presence of these rock stars.

Also, the dialogue is often perfunctory, knowingly empty, entirely generic and lacking in content. Friends talking in a cafe, executives at Nokia, parents dragging a child on holiday, lab technicians, the situations are carefully presented to give us only what we knew already and not to individualise: ‘I could run upstairs and get the figures,’ offers a Nokia employee. ‘From all accounts I think we’re pretty much exactly where we should be,’ comes a reply both drained of specificity and archly commenting on the precise conventionality of the response.

But also at work within the story is a story about acting. Jennifer spends the year between Festivals thinking of Oliver, a man she barely knows, just as we barely know Jennifer (and barely knew the doomed heroes of Postman’s Park) and this in turn triggers reflections on herself, just as, in imaginative engagement with these fictions, our own performances and fantasies are engaged. Once again, the mystery - if that’s not to strong a word - of acting and theatre-watching assert themselves in a picture of a life changed entirely by a quasi-theatrical engagement with quasi-fiction.

And again there’s something utopian about the affirmation, the way we can connect so simply an immediately with people who don’t exist - and with the actors who do. There’s a long physical sequence 40 minutes in, which the actors perform to exhaustion. It’s hard to watch partly because it asks questions about the limits of watching, marks plainly that we are in the same space with similar responsibilities to each other. It makes thick and bright the connections we are making in the room. And then there are the songs; cheesy, over-familiar maybe, but sung with enormous enjoyment, and collective enjoyment - a picture of friends singing together, the communitas overwhelming any fastidious distaste you might have for U2, or the boredom triggered like a smoke alarm by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And this underscores the sentiment expressed through this show - and, one remembers, throughout the trilogy - of a simple, unadorned, unironic wish that everyone will be okay.

The show reminds me hugely of Suspect Culture’s Timeless, one of the landmark shows in my life, though I’m sure entirely unknown to Lone Twin. University friends meeting after several years, trying to recapture the excitement of a night where they all went to the beach and lit a fire and ate pakoras, their awkwardness and their yearning, their regret and longing, the wish for the things they could say expressed in beautiful words, but also in song and gesture.

What rich, beautiful work.

Fen

Hard to believe it, but Caryl Churchill’s Fen has never had a professional London production since its premiere in 1983. Consequently, though I’ve read and taught the play a number of times, I’ve never seen it. It may be my favourite unseen play.

But now I have - and in style. Ria Parry’s production at the Finborough is exquisitely judged. The multiple characters are played by six actors on a small traverse of earth, with a wooden bridge at one end and the battered cupboards of a Fenland home at the other.

The sure decisions here are about the reality of things. Onions in a crate, potatoes in a pail, stones on the earth. Fen is about a life lived in the materiality of things, from which the characters struggle to lift themselves - high on a tractor, elevated by money, lifted on stilts. The production caught that beautifully.