WILD SHORES IN WARTIME
Risk taking a niche between seeing David Greig performs and also you neglect how downright louche issues are prone to end up. (I had these days revelled in Prudencia Hart and in Midsummer, the one with the talkimg willie) . Expect lyricism in sudden monologue, streaks of delusion and pagan weirdness, somebody lifeless or magic, and doubtless some sort of erotic cataclysm. In this case, a wrenching three-handed interlude in a semi-derelict pagan Hebridean rock chapel by the glimmer of a darkroom lantern, with one participant frenziedly envisaging a 3rd social gathering as a seagull (Intimacy Director credited, however nothing to frighten the horses). Oh, and be braced for essentially the most unlikely death-watch too.
The setting – achieved with moody magnificence within the tiny stage by Anna Lewis’ design- is a tiny island of the outer Hebrides, in 1939. Sound and setting evoke it fantastically (can verify, I’ve been to St Kilda). Dour previous Kirk is its leaseholder-landlord , a powerful Kevin McMonagle who units fireplace to each scene he’s in. Downtrodden Ellen (Whitney Kehinde) is his resident niece; he’s, reasonably towards her inclination, retaining her pure and first rate for some appropriate fisherman, in layers of forbidding shawls and skirts. Ellen’s actual ardour is for the cinema on the depraved mainland (or probably sinful Stornoway) the place she has managed to see Laurel and Hardy in Way Out West 37 instances . And conceived an erotic ardour for Stan Laurel, regardless of the bowler hat. This obsession she ultimately locks into the bare type of younger Robert swimming off the rocks. For into their rundown idyll of rock, storm and waves Robert has arrived, an arrogantly preoccupied Cantab naturalist despatched to survey the wildlife by the Ministry, accompanied by his assistant John, a gentler and extra conventionally ethical chap.
There are gloriously lyrical passages concerning the wild birds, the tiny curlews flying to sea for days, the rackety gannetry the place fulmars spit oil, the nice wheeling squabbling crowds flying by means of the storm by evening (the inspiration was Robert Atkinson’s well-known ebook ISLAND GOING, about such a rock island). They are marooned there, surveying, till the boat comes again on the finish of summer season. But on the very first evening previous Kirk lets drop the explanation for the survey: like Gruinard in historic reality, the island is scheduled to be poisoned wholesale in a drop of anthrax: an experimental British bio-weapon (by no means in the long run utilized in struggle, however which closed down Gruinard for many years). Kirk is venal, and simply must calculate how a lot compensation he’ll be owed for lifeless sheep and fowling-rights (he shoots puffin and the remaining). The younger males are horrified; it results in a violent row and catastrophe.
Sometimes it carries you alongside, sturdy in environment and setting, and Bruce Langley is a suitably unnerving Robert. One suspects it was our trendy feeling for wild nature that impressed this revival of a 2002 play, however after some time what Robert represents is definitely the least likeable face of naturalism: each residing factor as an object , Darwinian glee at nature’s ruthlessness, human emotions nowhere. His zoological remarks about Ellen are fairly chilly , and his angle each to ravenous curlew chicks and a human corpse ice-cold. Notably towards Fred Woodley Evans because the warmer-hearted, shyer John (knowledgeable debut, and a superb one). So the lads do make an attention-grabbing distinction .
Kehinde’s Ellen is at first a puzzle, shy and rustic (although with none Hebridean accent), and she or he is then given an erotically visionary speech about watching Robert swim and pleasure himself bare on the rocks which is – sorry Mr Greig – toe-curlingly expressive of a sure male thought of how younger ladies suppose. Later she involves correct life, taking command, talking the island myths, calling up the wildness in John as a result of Robert roused it in her. Sexual fireworks match the savage sounds of storm outdoors, with some superb traces and far ripping off of oilskins. And simply as you’re pondering hey, that is all a bit Lord of the Flies, a closing second echoes that just about exactly.
It gained an Olivier twenty years in the past, and was in some ways forward of its time in its melodramatic surrealism. Jessica Lazard directs at a superb tempo (although it might work higher minimize all the way down to a strong 90 minutes, as a result of the interval drops the temperature that bit too far. It’s a curiosity, higher performed than it actually deserves.
Rating 3
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