Theatre
Caravan (Bush) Dear Brutus (King's Head)
Seaside shenanigans
Sheridan Morley
With pub theatres across London under economic threat as never before, even under the last administration, we can at least celebrate the 25th birthday of the Bush which has done some handsome rebuilding even if you do still require an Everest diploma to scale the upper seats. Their rebirth season gets off to a strong if quirky start with Caravan, a first play by Helen Blakeman set in a Welsh seaside holiday caravan between 1994 and 1996. We have here a mother (the loudmouthed, loving Elizabeth Estensen), her two daugh- ters, and two men who end up in various claustrophobic permutations sleeping with all three of them.
But what might in other, Ayckbourn hands have become a semi-sitcom about relationships gone rancid in the summer rain is here gradually turned into some- thing more political and philosophic: the younger man (Nick Bagnall in a halting, nervy appearance) ends up a scab, stealing a job on the Liverpool docks from the older man (a weary, touching Pip Don- aghy) who is on a picket-line to protest against precisely the new-generation free- lancing that Bagnall represents.
So the play is as political as it is personal, and in the end all the major issues about the honour of labour and the political rights of workers in a time of recession are reduced to an unseemly squabble about who should own one poky caravan on a run-down seaside estate. Predictably it is the young would-be achievers at any cost who win out against the older idealists, but only through a series of half-hearted confi- dence tricks. Blakeman is clearly a young writer of promise, with an ear for the sharply fragmented dialogue of the twenty- something generation who regard educa- tion as something to be survived as quickly as possible, rather like chicken pox or her- pes and about as useful in the long run.
I guess the final irony of Caravan is that an extended family who might once have managed a loving home are destroyed not so much by rampant and semi-incestuous sexual infidelities as by the desire to take control of a rundown and claustrophobic summer caravan which anyone in their right mind would have sold off years ago, now that cheap flights to Spain offer a sunnier alternative. But 'having somewhere to go' is essential to these people, and the author's final point is that none of them has any- where to go, professionally, maritally or even domestically. It is a bitter and gloomy conclusion to a sometimes funny and oddly touching play, one that maybe should have been the pilot for a television series about hopelessness on Welsh beaches. But Blake- man is a powerful writer, and once she sorts out her priorities she will, I think, come up with a more focused piece about the politics inherent in any family dynamic.
Still around the London fringe, it is all too typical that it has been left to the King's Head to give us the first major revival since the war of a long-lost 1917 classic. The the- atre is still under threat of closure unless the London Arts Board can be rapidly per- suaded by the present administration that, if Islington is indeed heartland Blair, then closing its major and oldest-established the- atre might not be the best possible adver- tisement for the new arts-caring Labour.
My colleague Michael Billington has for years been berating our national companies for their lack of interest in major foreign drama; I believe their failing lies far closer to home. Neither the National nor the RSC have in 30 years bothered to look in any detail at the major British plays of 1900- 1960. Sure, they will give us the occasional over-familiar Coward or Shaw or Rattigan, usually as a grudging box-office gesture or because some wunderkind director thinks it might look good under water or with an all- deaf cast. But for a serious examination of Christopher Fry, or John Whiting, or Charles Morgan, or countless others you would do a lot better with Sam Walters at the Orange Tree in Richmond (again bare- ly subsidised) than at any of the palaces on the South Bank.
Which brings me to J.M. Barrie and the 1917 classic. The National are giving us Peter Pan for Christmas, in a version that opened shakily at the Barbican five years ago; but how much better for them to have done as the King's Head now have, and brought us back Dear Brutus. This was the play that gave Gerald du Maurier one of his greatest roles, a strange, haunting tale of a magic wood which allows its visitors a second chance at their lives. Located some- where between Wizard of Oz and Star Wars it is an unwieldy, unfashionable, precious piece but it shows us exactly how and why Barrie and du Maurier were so obsessed with Peter Pan and the idea of time travel. It is by no means a great play, but Stephanie Crawford's production on a tiny set and an even tinier budget makes one ache to see it brought back to full and expensive life. Maybe after their Lion King this should be the next Disney musical.
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