I was looking forward to rediscovering the plays of David Storey, several of which I saw in their original productions in 1960s-1970s. I remember The Contractor, The Changing Room and Home with Gielgud and Richardson. As the programme notes for In Celebration make clear, he's a hard writer to pigeonhole -- part of the postwar generation of northern realists and also part of the Royal Court tradition, but less political than some of his contemporaries. In Celebration shows a family reunion, with three sons revisiting their parents in a Yorkshire mining village on their 40th wedding anniversary. As in all family dramas, various skeletons tumble out of the woodwork. Apparently Storey wrote this play in three days -- an astonishing achievement. The characters are sharply drawn and the Yorkshire dialogue, particularly the lines spoken by the miner father, is wonderful. But the play is slow to get going and though we get the first glimpse of a skeleton bone in Act One, when a neighbour tactlessly mentions the fourth son, who died aged seven, there's no real conflict until Act Two. Even then, the drama flares up only briefly and the family part on reasonably good terms. This isn't a case of people knocking lumps out of each other in a family crisis AFTER WHICH NOTHING CAN POSSIBLY BE THE SAME AGAIN. It's more Chekhovian than that, though it falls short of Chekhov (most dramatists do...)
So how does the play fare, nearly 40 years on? I thought it worked pretty well, though it's a bit fuzzy in places. One of the sons, Andrew (Paul Hilton) is a solicitor who has abandoned his safe job to be an artist. Scruffy, long-haired and hard up, he is the troublemaker whose jealousy and resentment of his parents and his siblings makes him chippy and aggressive. Eventually we learn the childhood experience behind his behaviour. Every other family play these days seems to involve child abuse, and thankfully this one doesn't. The revelation is understated -- Andrew was sent for six weeks to stay with a neighbour after his brother Jamie died, and remembers crying on the doorstep of the family home. But the focus on Andrew's problems and his relationship with his mother never quite develops, partly because Steven, his schoolteacher brother, also seems to be nursing a secret trauma. Steven (Orlando Bloom) has given up writing his book and cries in his sleep at night, but is unable to tell us why, so he remains a mystery. The third brother Colin (Gareth Farr) is the uncomplicated one, an industrial relations executive in a big car factory who seems at ease with his lot. The fraternal tensions might have been easier to present had Storey included a wife for one of the brothers. But this isn't Pinter's The Homecoming, and it's unfair to expect Storey to write a different play from the one he did. There is a social message in this play about the gap between the working class parents and their middle class children, but it's understated.
Tim Healy is absolutely terrific as the father. No surprise there for anyone who ever watched Auf Wiedersehen Pet or saw him in Billy Elliot, except for the ease with which he switches from his native Geordie to Yorkshire vowels. Dearbhla Molloy is equally good as his wife. Excellent performances all round and once more I tip my hat to the director Anna Mackmin for getting more than 100 per cent out of her cast. This is her first big West End play and it reinforced my impression of her talent. Previously I had seen Dying for It and The Lightning Play, both at the Almeida. She seems to have the knack of making her cast really believe in what they are doing.
The set design by Lez Brotherston is faultless, down to the knitted stripy teacosy on the teapot. Naturalism demands a real sense of period and place, and the cutaway design of a two-up, two-down terrace house fits the bill perfectly. I was hit by the contrast with the anachronisms and mistakes in the National Theatre's production of Gorky's Philistines. I haven't blogged about this show yet as I intend to do a bit of literary research to see just how much Andrew Upton's 'version' differs from what Gorky wrote.
As Michael Billington has noted, straight plays are as rare as hen's teeth in the West End at the moment, and we have the presence of Orlando Bloom to thank for the fact that this one is putting bums on seats. The bums are mostly female between the ages of 18 and 35, and they swarm around the stage door of the Duke of York's after the show. There's conspicuous security inside the theatre but thank goodness, the Bloom admirers behaved impeccably throughout. There was no applause when he came on stage and no flash photography. This is his first stage performance ever after several years on screen -- a test for any actor -- and he's okay. But because the character he's playing is so repressed he doesn't really get a chance to show us what he can do.
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