Theatre 1
Perfect Days (Hampstead) The Memory of Water (Vaudeville) Merchant of Venice; The Tempest (Barbican)
Mothers from hell
Sheridan Morley
If 1999 carries on the way it has started, theatrically this new year is going to be a tough one for the male of the species; five of them turn up in the first two plays of the season, Liz Lochhead's Perfect Days and Shelagh Stephenson's The Memory of • Water, and all are a complete and utter waste of space.
In that sense, I guess both new produc- tions are `women's plays', but intriguingly neither is any kind of feminist tract; both are written within well-defined comic guidelines, both are traditionally well- made, and both are clearly destined for some kind of after-life on television, which is where either could have started as some- thing halfway from a serial drama to a sit- com.
Most Edinburgh Festival hits make the long trek south in the following months looking distinctly hungover, and often very fragile in the colder light of a London win- ter; the wonder of Perfect Days is that it is every bit as good as we were told from Scotland last August.
In an elegant Glasgow loft lives Barbs (the feisty and fiery Siobhan Redmond in what will clearly be one of the perfor- mances of the year), who has her own day- time television slot and a highly successful hairdressing salon. What she doesn't have is a baby and, approaching 40, she decides this has to be sorted. An ex-husband of remarkable if hopeless tolerance, a gay boyfriend, a college-age lover and a mother from hell are soon on the scene to aid and abet her quest for motherhood, . and Lochhead's hugely vital, funny and charm- ing comedy looks at times as if Neil Simon had rewritten Shirley Valentine north of the border.
No, Perfect Days is not perfect, but in John Tiffany's production what saves it from being a dire morality play is Lochhead's evident enjoyment of her char- acters and their various social and sexual predicaments. If it weren't to sound like a sexist insult, I'd say she was a new Willy Russell in drag. The other 'new' play of the week dates still further back, to the July of 1996, and also features a mother from hell, though in this case she does have the grace to be dead, albeit omnipresent. This one comes from Hampstead, where Shelagh Stephen- son's first script, the patchily brilliant The Memory of Water, was first seen in a pro- duction by Terry Johnson. Nearly three years later, after a long regional tour, a new production comes into the Vaudeville, again directed by Johnson but with an all- new cast starring Alison Steadman, Saman- tha Bond and Julia Sawalha as the three sisters gathered at their old family home on the north-east coast of England to bury their cantankerous mother (Margot Leices- ter), who reappears periodically from beyond her shiny new coffin to make all their lives still more troublesome.
The Memory of Water is no Blithe Spirit, but it is an intriguing throwback to all those plays of the early 1950s by Wynyard Browne and N.C. Hunter, 'English Chekhov' as they were then termed, in which at some kind of family reunion skele- tons would tumble from every closet. Sure enough these three sisters, all of whose lives have in their individual ways gone horribly adrift, turn out to have been bruised beyond belief by a maternal upbringing somewhere between Alan Ben- nett and Joe Orton, and the genius of Johnson's production is the way that once again it ends up in bleak, black humour, not waving but drowning in its various admissions of familial guilt and relative failure.
At the Barbican, the RSC has long had an intriguing habit of wrong-footing its crit- ics in the very nick of time; just as the Sun- day Times, across three pages, finally takes up the message I have been trying to deliv- er for almost two years here, that the com- pany is in some kind of artistic breakdown, hey presto! two productions come into London looking very sharp indeed, while out at Stratford on the home stage a new
`It must be for Arthur .
Winter's Tale is also hailed (see review below).
The Philip Voss Merchant of Venice has a sinewy strength and speed, while also on the main Barbican stage Adrian Noble's The Tempest has a powerfully unusual Pros- pero in David Calder, who philosophically drives this staging through to new discover- ies and map-readings of an island which has always been as sinister in its magic as the Neverland of Peter Pan. There are also strongly. comic turns from Barry Stanton (Stephano) and Adrian Schiller ffrinculo) in two of the unfunniest jester. roles ever written even by Shakespeare.
Nobody, not even me, has ever doubted Noble's talent as a director; the question still open is whether he is also the producer who can, in these last pre-millennium months, pull the RSC back into some kind of overall shape before it fragments entire- ly into individual productions on a wide variety of London and regional stages. These two Barbican transfers indicate that there is still a problem with talent in the middle and lower ranks of the company, and still another with verse-speaking and even sometimes understanding; but they are the most encouraging start to a new year that the RSC has had in a very long time, and the hope must be that once again the company can pull itself together in the very nick of time.
Previous page
