Theatre
A Place at the Table (Bush) Freelancers (Man in the Moon)
The now and then
Sheridan Morley
Is writing for television a life or merely a livipg? Simon Block's bitchy, black comedy at the Bush has as its central figure a wheelchair-bound playwright (Eddie Marsan) who is asked by a desperate script editor (Joanne Pearce) to write a weekly sitcom about being disabled. One of Block's points, of course, is that writers are disabled even if they are not actually crip- pled; the demands of television, its neurot- ic, ratings-chasing employees, its treachery and trickery, all conspire against the truth just as they conspire against anything out of the ordinary. And wheelchairs, for us lucky ones, are still out of the ordinary.
Better by far, surely, to stay within the safer confines of the theatre? But that, Block never lets us forget, also has its prob- lems, notably debts and a diminishing will to live; at least television can pay the mort- gage and the school fees, always assuming you have a hit and play by the scheduling rules.
Block's only other characters are a viciously ambitious runner (James Lance) and a yuppie student (Katharine Burford) who has chosen to be a glorified reception- ist in a TV production office rather than go to college and study art history because, as she explains, television is so very now, and art history is so very then. Block targets thinking like that, as well as the appalling patronage to which the disabled are still treated on the daily basis of 'does he take sugar?' If anything, the problem with A Place at the Table is that it has too many targets, from the wilful cowardice of television schedulers to the age-old problem of art versus commerce; the image of the writer as someone disabled for whom insults and embarrassment are daily problems is . a powerful one, as is the reckoning that in television the wheel doesn't ever need re- inventing, just a little oil to keep it running smoothly. But in this wittily sustained whinge, tightly directed by Julie-Anne Robinson, there are only so many times we can race around the track without meeting ourselves on the way back. Block asks all the right questions, and fails to come up with any answers; a man in a wheelchair needs a miracle just as urgently as televi- sion needs courage and some new ideas, but just as he is unlikely to be able to throw away his crutches and walk, so commercial and now even licence-paid television is unlikely ever to throw off the shackles of the ratings and the budgets. We know all that already; what Block does, with a very strong quartet of players, is show us just what this all means to people's lives.
As so often at the Bush, A Place at the Table is better played than plotted: it will doubtless be argued that television has very occasionally shown the courage to deal with disability in such series as The Singing Detective; but broadcasting has indeed now become narrowcasting, and Block is out there, not waving but drowning as he sig- nals where it has all gone so horribly wrong.
Somewhere around 30 years ago, just about the time when Tony Shaffer's Sleuth was reckoned to have killed off the stage thriller forever, when Beyond the Fringe was similarly reckoned to have demolished revue as a form of theatre, Ronald Har- wood's The Dresser also seemed to finish off the backstage play. All three were just so good, both in their own right and as commentaries on the genre, that nobody much bothered to see if any of the formats would ever have legs again.
Which is kind of sad, given that all three concepts had worked well enough for the best part of a century and leave a curious gap in any theatrical mix, now they are no longer there. For which reason we need to welcome Freelancers at the Man in the Moon in Chelsea. Its authors, Annie Whit- field and Shelley Longworth, have hit on a format which was once known on television as Take Three Girls. Here, one is a wannabe pop star, another an aspiring stunt girl, and a third is the one with the loving heart and the perennial weight prob- lem. So far, so familiar; except that these three girls (Elizabeth Conboy, Shelley Longworth and Annelie Whitfield) are not sharing an office or a flat; they are sharing a dressing-room, during what sounds like a perfectly appalling three-week run of a mediaeval open-air epic set in the grounds of a castle some way from London.
It is in short the engagement from hell, and there are dangerous moments here when the claustrophobic backstage interest flags, and you long to see more of the show going on out of doors; but what works very well is the constantly shifting power-play in front of the dressing-room mirrors, as each aspiring actress has to make sexual deci- sions about their director, financial deci- sions about their future and career deci- sions about whether this is the life they really want. The ending is a brisk Pirandel- lian cop-out, and at around 80 minutes the authors don't give their actresses much time to do more than flick through their various alternative lifestyles. But some- where in here is a concept worth develop- ing, maybe even a TV or radio series about the faces under the greasepaint. Carl Proc- tor directs a brisk staging at a theatre down the King's Road that has an intriguingly loose-limbed policy of long-lost classics and new writing, but seems for some reason to have fallen off the major critical map.
Previous page
