Harper Regan

I'm worried I may be turning into a West End Whinger.  Tonight I skipped the second half of a new play, something I do very rarely.  The last time was also at the Cottesloe, when I lost patience with Samuel Adamson's Southwark Fair a couple of years ago.  This time I didn't even retire to the bar for a glass of Merlot.  In fact it would have taken several bottles of Merlot to make me want to go back for the second half of this turgid new play by Simon Stephens about a woman who travels from her home in Uxbridge to her parental nest in Stockport where her father is ill.  She gets there too late and he's already dead, so she goes to the pub...Actually, I won't bother explaining what happens.  It's just too tedious.  By leaving before the final whistle I may of course have missed a scintillating second half which would have revealed Simon Stephens as the new Shakespeare. I haven't seen any of his other work, so I entered the theatre with an entirely open mind. But an hour of indescribable tedium, stilted dialogue and unbelievable characters was quite enough. Stephens seems for some reason to be very popular in Germany, where theatre is so heavily subsidised that it doesn't have to bother much about entertaining the punters and putting bums on seats.  I don't mind bad writing if at least there's a pulsating sense of energy underneath, but this was limp stuff.  Like Adamson, Stephens seems on the evidence of this play incapable of writing a scene that involves more than two characters.  The set is a dreary grey, rather like the outside of the National Theatre.  At some point I was hoping to sniff (metaphorically speaking) something nasty buried under the floorboards that would bring the play to life, but by the end of Act One it hadn't appeared.  The actors seemed to be doing their best to make us believe in the lines they were speaking, and no blame should be attached to the director Marianne Elliott, whose rising reputation should survive intact.  I'm sure my spirits will recover next week when I go to the three parts of Henry VI at the Roundhouse.  As for this play, I am sure it will be a big hit in Germany.

Comments

[Bis]

1) Motortown, Stephens' lasr play, appears to be based on Buchner. Perhaps that may be a reason for his work to be performed in Germany.
2) Austrian basement situations (using your under the floorboards metaphor)could be described as topical, rather than tedious.
3) Shakespeare must hold the record as being one of the most subsidised writers ever - Mao being the only rival that springs to mind.
4) Perhaps you could describe the plot of Othello using only the first half of the play.

[PeterS]

I absolutely agree - I also left at the interval (unfortunately we were in the centre otherwise we might have escaped earlier).

Lots of good stuff on at the National at the moment - but this is a stinker!