New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme; Crucible, Sheffield; Lyttelton, LondonDramatic irony proves deeply affecting as the domestic and the epic meet in the lives of Lancashire folk in August 1914
An almost empty stage: the edge of a moor suggested by fragments of stone wall; an interior indicated by table and chairs. From next to nothing a world appears. August 1914, the north-west of England, an industrial community (livelihoods depending on the textile mills) is preparing its annual summer celebration. A lad paints a banner for the Rushcart festival. The "Squire" of the morris men flies into a fury because the flowers he's been growing to decorate his hat on the big day have been eaten by neighbour JU's escaped chickens – they haven't spoken since the last time she let them get away, three years ago. The Squire's daughter is secretly walking out with JU's son. He is a brilliant but dangerously innovative dancer ("There's no call for artistic expression!"), too scared to ask Squire's permission to court his daughter.
Local gossip and squabbles about whether women should be allowed to join the dance (in smaller and larger senses) are interspersed with snippets of further-off affairs: recruiting bands are playing in nearby towns – "Arthur Barraclough's taken the shilling!" The young men's eyes shine. We know, as the characters do not, that this war will not be An August Bank Holiday Lark (the title is taken from a line in Philip Larkin's poem MCMXIV). Even as the life of the community unfurls vividly before us, it is ripped to shreds: the young men leave to fight, the women take over their work and the world changes irrevocably.
Writer Deborah McAndrew uses the audience's knowledge of events to add texture to this deceptively simple script. It's a potentially dangerous tactic: dramatic irony is cloying if overused. McAndrew avoids this by skilfully interweaving three time strands: the linear time lived by the community on the stage, the vertical time of history and the cyclical time of seasons and rituals. The result is simultaneously domestic and epic: events in a particular place and time become the expression of universal experience of the effects of war. It is deeply affecting.
An August Bank Holiday Lark is McAndrew's fifth piece for Northern Broadsides. It's Broadsides' sixth co-production with the New Vic (set and costumes by their resident designer, Lis Evans). Artistic director Barrie Rutter dreamed up the brief for the piece, which he directs, and in which he delivers a truly outstanding performance as the Squire (fury, grief, joy, desolation – all breathtakingly intense). Resident director Conrad Nelson weaves music and choreography seamlessly into the action. Four of the 12-strong cast have performed with the company before; all sing, dance (complicated morris footwork and patterns), play instruments and portray convincing, textured, multilayered characters (special mentions for Darren Kuppan and Emily Butterfield as the courting couple, and Mark Thomas making his first professional appearance). This is popular ensemble theatre in traditions stretching from Molière to Meyerhold and beyond: vibrant, entertaining and meaningful.
Brian Friel's 1980 Translations also uses the audience's awareness of history, but his format is that of a "thesis play". He sets up an idea and works through it by way of situation and characters (Ben Jonson-ish to Northern Broadsides's Shakespeare-ish). Here, in this Sheffield, English Touring and Rose Kingston theatres co-production, community tradition is revealed not through songs and dances, but in names and language. It's 1833 and the British army is mapping Ireland in order better to administer the country (ie, more efficiently collect taxes). Part of the exercise involves replacing "incomprehensible" Gaelic place names with others easier for anglophone ears and tongues (further rationalisation will establish compulsory schooling, available only in English).
Questions raised by the text – around ideas of colonisation as domination; identity as an individual and collective construct; civilisation as a shifting term depending on viewpoint – stand out clearly in James Grieve's production. The setting is stark. In the background stands a realistic barn/home of rough stone, with wooden stairs clinging to its side; before it stretches the playing area, wide and deep and charcoal grey (Lucy Osborne's design). This is the site of a "hedge school" where "the Master" (a roaring tour de force from Niall Buggy) and his younger son instruct local youths and adults in Homer's Greek, times tables and everything in between. Normal life is interrupted by the arrival of a British captain, his lieutenant and their translator – elder son of the Master – and (offstage) troops.
Grieve plots the movements of his actors with precision. He makes sure that each character strongly conveys the idea they represent (James Northcote's corporal with his Tiggerishly energetic – bounding into the air – naive enthusiasm for all things Irish, and growing attraction for Máire, for instance; Beth Cooke's Máire, expressing her longing for a wider world of possibilities). The device of having Irish-speakers and English-speakers failing to understand one another while all speaking English succeeds beautifully.
What was lacking was the emotional intensity of, for instance, the National Theatre's 2004 touring version, directed by Sean Holmes. Without it, the situation is more interesting than engrossing, the ideas less urgently compelling. This coolly intelligent production promises deepening complexity as the run develops.
The National Theatre's new production of Shelagh Delaney's 1958 hit A Taste of Honey is a puzzle. In the first place: why do it? It was attention-grabbing when Joan Littlewood produced it at Stratford East in 1958: written by a little-educated Salford teenager – and a girl, at that; featuring a flighty, sexually active single mother; interracial, underage sex; pregnancy; intimations of paedophilia, homosexuality and, perhaps most shocking of all, a working-class, northern setting. It's a lively script, but now that TV soaps regularly cover all these issues it seems less satisfying as a stage drama. A revival makes us look back in wonder at the parochialism of the mid-20th century London theatre that found it so extraordinary.
In the second place: if you are going to do it, why do it like this? A production by Jo Combes at Manchester Royal Exchange in 2008 communicated the strengths of the play by precisely unpicking the layers of emotion striating mother and daughter's fraught relationship. Here, under Bijan Sheibani's direction, the emphasis is heavily on comedy; at times, it seems, anything goes, so long as it raises a laugh. This plays oddly against Hildegard Bechtler's set of dreary streets, distant gas tower and squalid sitting room; its close attention to realistic detail contrasts with the artificiality of the actors' cartoon-style movement. Lesley Sharp as the mother is most extreme – hips heading one way, shoulders another, head jabbing on an alternative plane.
This would be terrific in a Restoration comedy; here, it constrains the character. It's as if the director doesn't trust the play to be interesting without extreme exaggeration. And yet there are terrific moments – Sharp, again, in stricken moments showing the horror beneath the mother's mask of self-interested insouciance; the scenes between Kate O'Flynn as her teenage, pregnant daughter and Harry Hepple as the diffident gay friend. These suggest there's more to Sheibani's vision than is currently realised in a production struggling to free itself from an over-ponderous concept.
Star ratings (out of 5)An August Bank Holiday Lark *****Translations ****A Taste of Honey ***
TheatreNational TheatreShelagh DelaneyFirst world warIrelandClare Brennantheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
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