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Sedos presents
By Jim Cartwright Directors Chris DePury and Matt Harrison
Bridewell Theatre
15 April – Sat 19 April 2008
A review by Maddy Ryle for EXTRA! EXTRA!
First produced in 1986, Jim Cartwright’s Road, a portrayal of a Lancashire community devastated by the impact of poverty and unemployment in the Thatcher era, has enjoyed huge success, winning several awards, being adapted for TV by Alan Clarke, and getting voted 36th best play of the Twentieth Century in a poll by the National Theatre. Sedos’ production at the Bridewell, or perhaps any revival of this play, would not, I’m sure, make it into the same list for the Twenty-first Century. I can imagine that in the mid-Eighties the impact of Cartwright’s work would have really struck home, but unfortunately taken out of the context of that immediate political situation it loses a lot of its’ bite. That’s not to say that there aren’t universal themes in the play which still ring true – poverty, alcohol abuse, domestic violence and the human desire for “something more to life” are absolutely still cogent issues and no doubt always will be. However, if Sedos wanted to make a comment about our current times, then they could have done with modernising the production to make that come across. As it stands, their version is a celebration of Cartwright’s achievement, but it doesn’t have the urgency that the piece of work was no doubt intended to have. The road of the title is an anonymous street in a working class town, and our guide is Scullery (played by Panny Skrivanos), who ‘walks’ the audience through the various homes, pubs, clubs and encounters that take place on a typical Saturday night. Apparently the play is often performed in promenade. The Bridewell doesn’t have the space for that, but given the complexities of including so many locations on stage simultaneously, I thought the staging was excellent, making use of a constructed balcony to create two tiers, with the characters often speaking up or down to one another – emphasising the difficulties in human communication that are central to the play. There are around 30 characters in Road, played here by a cast of 19. Inevitably some are more convincing than others. The opening scenes, in which practically every character comes across as a curmudgeonly alcoholic, don’t grab you at first, and it takes some time for you to feel engaged with the people represented onstage. And many of them you never do - they seem to just be background drinkers, slags and scoundrels, and not real people at all, which detracts from the credibility of the rest. That said, there are some really powerful vignettes. Cartwright’s language is beautiful and moving at times (as well as very funny at others); in particular, there are several poetic monologues which were the real highlights of the evening. Skinlad (played by the excellent Darren Hannant), gives a visceral and genuinely scary account of his transition from violent skinhead to desperate Buddhist, capturing that violent tension and simultaneous humour which is so well portrayed in Shane Meadows’ This is England. Another potent moment is when Emma Hillman’s housewife, drab and pitiful in her dressing gown while the rest of the cast is out on the piss, tells the tale of her poverty-inflicted descent into household drudgery and her unemployed husband’s alcohol-fuelled domestic abuse. In another monologue, a great performance from Pete Picton as the father of one of the young lads on the street gives a brilliant impression of the nostalgia for more innocent and meaningful times that everyone feels as they age. The longest scene in the piece is given over to a young couple, Joey and Clare, who are both out of work and hopeless about the future, and so have gone on a hunger strike in Joey’s bedroom. We see them degenerate physically while, simultaneously, Joey seeks ever more desperately – again through a series of monologues delivered by the excellent Matt Matravers – for some meaning to his life, which you are invited to feel was worth so much more. The staging is again used to great effect when their double bed is upended in the centre of the stage, so their final words are delivered with the audience, as it were, looking down on them from above. All in all then, this is a play in many pieces, and I would have to describe the overall effect as patchy. There are some really great moments within it, and some excellent performances from the Sedos cast, but it doesn’t hang together convincingly. Without the political and social context of the 1980s in which it was written, it makes the viewer search for the more general, human messages it contains, and at times these come across very powerfully (especially in the fumbled sexual encounters which occur at the end of the night), but ultimately there is not enough there to give it the punch it was written to deliver.
Tickets: £12.50 (£10.00 concessions and members) 7:45pm Tues – Sat The Bridewell Theatre, Bride Lane, off Fleet Street, Box office: www.sedos.co.uk Tel: 07886 645618 (leave a message in working hours) http://www.stbridefoundation.org/bridewelltheatre/index.html
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