Sabotage in the third row
Lloyd Evans
Three Women and a Piano-Tuner Hampstead The Canterbury Tales Southwark Playhouse Here’s a phrase you don’t hear very often. High drama at the Hampstead Theatre. Helen Cooper’s play Three Women and a Piano Tuner (irritating title) opens as a rather earnest frivolity. The characters are a dead-safe bunch, all middle-aged, middle-income, middle-class middle-Englanders. As for the plot, well, that’s middling, too. Three sisters in a kitchen discuss husband troubles and career woes. Raunchy Liz is a concert pianist, mumsy Ella is a frustrated composer and pompous Beth has married into money. The meeting is a set-up. Ella wants Beth to pay Liz to perform her latest piano concerto in public. What a yawn.
And then suddenly it all started. An elderly female voice in the stalls piped up. ‘Can you hear anything? I can’t.’ Instant panic. We all swivelled towards the source of the noise — a crown of snowy white curls in Row C — while on stage the actors struggled to bypass the disruption. After a momentary wobble, they got the play back on track and everyone relaxed. Then the ancient saboteuse did it again. ‘I can’t hear a word,’ she heckled. ‘Can you?’ Silent alarm spread across the auditorium. It was as if the Pope were being interrupted by a stripogram. The poor actors regrouped and managed to hustle their way through this second ambush, but by now the entire act was ruined. Instead of watching the stage, we were all glancing towards the loose-cannon granny in Row C, hoping that her dysfunctional deaf aid would spark off another unscripted explosion. Just for the fun of it.
It’s a bad sign when a burst of audience backchat generates more interest than the play itself. But the second half held another huge surprise. From nowhere, the script acquired depth and resonance. The chickflick witter of Act I was forgotten, and we were plunged into a rancorous and brilliantly observed power struggle between the three sisters. When Beth agrees to fund the premiere of Ella’s concerto, she demands that a key section of the work be cut. Ella reacts with fury. Invoking her artistic integrity, she turns to Liz for support. But Liz agrees with Beth. The resulting catfight is full of subtle and aggressive wit, and at times it reaches a rare level of dramatic intensity. Each character stands for a moral attitude — Beth is avarice, Ella duty, Liz indulgence — and yet at the same time they remain fully realised human beings. No male author, except possibly Oscar Wilde, has written such caustic and emotionally truthful dialogue for women.
There are excellent performances, in particular from Eleanor David who plays Liz as a wasted, hard-as-nails nymphomaniac. Imagine Fergie on Viagra. But I’m not saying the second act is perfect. The role of the piano-tuner, Harold (Gareth David-Lloyd), is so underwritten that it scarcely merits inclusion. At one point the director Sam West gives Harold a moment alone on a stool. He has an apple which he proceeds to devour, crunch crunch crunch, while being watched by the three sisters. It goes on for ages. Crunch crunch crunch. The intention, I think, is to create a pause full of dramatic tension and poignancy. It just seemed tedious. Crunch crunch crunch. I hoped our deaf friend in Row C might help out. But she seemed to have fallen mute.
A hearty group of actors from the Southwark Playhouse has recreated the spirit of The Canterbury Tales. It’s part the atre, part tourism and part wacky-Englishmidsummer-jape. You gather at the Tabard Inn to hear an improvised prologue and then you set off on a tour of the neighbourhood’s backstreets. In gardens and churchyards along the way, the tales are enacted in modern English. The show has bundles of charm and the actors are genuinely funny. The only drawback is the weather. The night I went the heavens opened, and I looked enviously at the mummers protected by their full-length hooded robes. They remain unbudgeably ‘in character’ even while walking from venue to venue. They mingle with the crowd and banter away in a pastiche of mediaeval Cockney. Or they enact little dramas of their own. On Borough High Street, I watched a penitent knight pleading to God for forgiveness. Then I was overtaken by two randy pardoners chasing a nun down Maiden Lane. I saw one buxom yokel (smoking a Marlboro Light) chatting to a Canadian tourist. ‘What be that?’ she asked pointing at his digicam. ‘Doan tell me. A toim machine.’ In the end I couldn’t decide if the whole thing was wonderfully eccentric or faintly irritating. A bit of both maybe.
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