Review: Once Bitten (Orange Tree Theatre)

For the festive season at the delightful Orange Tree Theatre, Artistic Director Sam Walters offers a kind of grown up pantomime in the form of a totally lightweight French farce. I don’t think any kind of theatre makes me as nervous as, in my experience, farces tend to be either glorious or unbearable. Reggie Oliver’s translation of Alfred Hannequin and Alfred Delacour’s 1875 farce (a prototype in the genre) Once Bitten offers something in the middle: apart from some elements of snobbery that mark it out as very much of its time, the piece has its heart in the right place and the Belle Epoque costumes are delectable, but the writing isn’t consistently funny or frantic enough to sustain nearly two and a half hours.

As Reggie Oliver explains in the programme notes, farce developed in early nineteenth-century France as light entertainment for the emerging bourgeoisie who wanted to see elements from their own society on stage. I wonder if the new middle classes really were as rich and idle as the people who inhabit these plays and the attitude towards servants almost makes one wonder if the Revolution actually happened. I may be reading into something that isn’t there, but it did leave (to this reviewer at least) an aftertaste of smugness and snobbery.

The would-be lawyer Fauvinard is planning a rendezvous with his mistress Cesarine using his friend Tardivaut (a debonair Mark Frost) as his alibi, but nothing goes according to plan, especially when his interfering mother-in-law (played by Briony McRoberts with echoes of Endora from Bewitched) gets involved. An evil poodle also wreaks havoc and several hands have to be bandaged along with wounded dignities and egos.

David Antrobus’s high energy performance gives Fauvinard an appealing sense of an essentially decent man motivated more by a desire to escape from the home that his mother-in-law dominates than by lust (a pity that his wife Angele is such a nonentity). Michael Kirk has a small but rambunctious cameo as an officious Commissioner of Police and I liked Rebecca Egan in the brief role of a wronged wife in a potential divorce case, bringing a touch of stillness and poignancy amidst all the silliness.

Sam Dowson’s glamorous design makes full use of the Orange Tree’s unique space (I saw some children who seemed enchanted by the idea of being able to walk through the set at the interval) that acts as Fauvinard’s study, Cesarine’s boudoir and the study again. Sam Walters ensures that the cast embrace their characters’ one-note personalities and they mostly remain likable, which is no mean feat considering how limited they are. For frivolous escapism, it’s a show that’s mildly diverting, but not excessively so.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: The Company Man (Orange Tree)

"You notice everything when you can’t move." So says the wheelchair bound wife and mother in Torben Betts’s play and, indeed, this theme of watching from the sidelines and being unable to communicate is central to the play which places human beings as mere micro-organisms in an infinitely larger and harsher sphere.

The word 'company' can refer to both business and friendship, and the eponymous Company Man's

decision to prize industrial success above everything is what ultimately isolates him from humanity at large.

Betts is a protégé of Alan Ayckbourn and the play is a rather bleak family drama with plenty of apocalyptic references. Betts portrays this family as embodying the best and the worst of this changeable world, in which anything can be achieved through hard work, but terrible illnesses can also strike anyone, regardless of privilege.

It's set in a lavish home in the leafy Home Counties, though Sam Dowson’s very simple set, consisting of a chintzy sofa, a garden table and chairs, a bedside cabinet and photographic prints of the play’s recurring motifs could belong to a family of any income. It is an oddly sterile and impersonal setting for a family home, perhaps intended to evoke the way in which the house is merely a gathering place, but like the play itself, only partially rings true.

The story is dominated by William Carmichael (Bruce Alexander), a self-made working class man, who endured a traumatic childhood and made his own way up to the top, which he never lets anyone forget. His resentment towards anyone who hasn’t had to overcome to same obstacles is what poisons his relationship with his son. It is difficult to feel much sympathy towards a character who is not engaging enough to earn it. His recurring catchphrases guarantee laughs from the audience, but although I appreciate that the repetitiveness of his lectures about cricket statistics, ornithology and capitalism are to illuminate his unwillingness to listen to others or connect with anything more emotionally complicated than bare facts, it is tempting for both his onstage and offstage audiences to grow restless during these tirades.

Isla Blair is excellent as his wife Jane, amongst the last of a ‘dying breed’ of women brought up to serve their husbands and under the death sentence of the horribly debilitating Motor Neurone Disease. Blair poignantly embodies Jane’s determination to maintain her dignity and sense of irony through the pain, and her resolve to make the final decision about her illness.

Nicholas Lumley has the well-meaning but unconvincing role of family friend Jim, who always wanted to be more than friends with Jane and has now found God, offering kindly meant but most unhelpful rhetoric about suffering being a blessing. Beatrice Curnew is nicely restrained in the underwritten role of the self-sacrificing carer daughter Cathy and Jack Sandle is appropriately volatile as prodigal son Richard.

The Company Man is well performed and full of ideas with some striking astronomical imagery, but it's somewhat let down by the characterisation. The permanently in-the-round Orange Tree Theatre is a wonderful space and although Adam Barnard’s direction (he previously directed Betts’s play The Swing of Things at the Stephen Joseph Theatre) is clear and unobtrusive, one rarely feels entirely absorbed in the proceedings.

Written for musicOMH

Review: The Thunderbolt (Orange Tree)

Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934), a contemporary of George Bernard Shaw, is not exactly a household name these days in spite of being one of the most prolific and popular playwrights of his time with an oeuvre that included light farce, sentimental comedies, and ‘problem plays’ about contemporary society. Like Shaw and Ibsen, Pinero had a particular interest in the role of women in Victorian and Edwardian society, the most famous on the subject being The Second Mrs Tanquery, which was referenced by Hillaire Belloc in his poem about Matilda who told such dreadful lies (indeed, I never realised that it was a real play before doing my research for The Thunderbolt). The female characters in this play are shown to be grasping vultures (but no more so than their husbands), desperately nervy and almost too good and forgiving to be true. It is the illegitimate daughter who has far more class than any of her ‘legitimate’ relations.

The Thunderbolt could probably be best described as a family drama filled with unpleasant and desperate characters satirising greed, petty rivalries and the desperation of keeping up appearances in the fictional Midlands town of Singlehampton. At nearly three hours long, some of the long-winded passages could be trimmed, but it refrains from the tedious philosophising that certain Ibsen and Shaw plays suffer from and has an agreeable lightness of touch.

This play works beautifully from being presented in the round as the audience steps through the late Mr Edward’s library (designed by Sam Dowson) to get to their seats. Set changes are deftly handled by the cast re-arranging the furniture to create a whole new room. The dining room table in Act II is revealed to be three separate cabinets that form part of Mr and Mrs Thad’s drawing room. Very simple, but so effective.

The Mortimores have to be one of the most ghastly families in fiction. The sudden death of the eldest brother Edward Mortimore, a wealthy brewer who was estranged from the rest of the family has his three surviving brothers and one sister and their spouses descending en masse, calculating what they believe to be their rightful inheritance as next of kin to the last penny. The introduction of Edward’s lovely illegitimate daughter Helen (Grainne Keenan) temporarily complicates the celebrations. Helen refuses to accept an allowance from her newly discovered relations, determined to make her own living as an artist through the invaluable education that her father ensured she received, in spite of being deeply hurt not knowing whether her father meant to provide for her or not. The Mortimores are only too happy to respect her independence.

The acting amongst the entire cast is impeccable, including Geoff Leesley as bluff family spokesman and property developer Mr Jim and David Whitworth as local newspaper editor and insufferable pedant Mr Stephen. Brenda Longman and Julie Teal make the most of their roles as their sour wives. The sole sister Rose (Janet Spencer Turner) is an aspiring London society hostess and her husband Colonel Ponting (Osmond Bullock) might actually be the most avaricious of the lot.

The society of Singlehampton is one in which to be a grocer’s daughter is a fate worse than death, evidenced in the abuse that youngest brother Thaddeus’s wife Phyllis receives from her in-laws. Natalie Ogle excels in the role of this complicated woman who is deeply vulnerable and scarred from the years of cruelty. She is well supported by Stuart Fox as her husband. The very fact that Thad and Phyllis love each other and had the spirit to rebel by getting married sets them apart from the other Mortimores.

While I am not entirely sure if The Thunderbolt is a lost ‘masterpiece,’ it retains its power to expose the timeless themes of greed, hypocrisy and social snobbery in a quietly angry way. It is impossible not to feel indignant when Mr Jim grovels to Helen, stretching her generosity to the limit. It could hardly be better served by Sam Walters’s stylish production and the flawless ensemble cast. I am still not certain as to whom (or what) the ‘Thunderbolt’ of the title refers- perhaps it is the way in which the Mortimores’ smug complacency is suddenly threatened by public scandal. Of course they’ll never appreciate Helen’s compassion that protects them from this, but Pinero must be suggesting that she is the richest in the end, being the only one who can move forward with a clear conscience and build a life to be proud of.

Written for A Younger Theatre