John Morrison

Foxfinder

Foxes, like them or loathe them, are plentiful.  Exciting new plays are harder to find, though the tiny Finborough Theatre in Earls Court is always a good place to start looking.  Foxfinder by Dawn King is a tautly constructed 90-minute four-hander set in a half-familiar, half-strange rural England where foxes have been wiped out.

 Nobody sees them, or even their prints in the mud.  But the animal lives on as The Beast, a malign spectre which can ruin crops, poison dreams, lure children to their deaths and rip people to pieces with its claws. Into the isolated farmhouse of Samuel and Judith Covey comes William Bloor the Foxfinder, an intense 19-year-old on a mission to root out 'contamination'.  He's never actually seen a fox but has been indoctrinated against them since the day he was taken from his parents to an institute at the age of five and taught that 'England' is his mother.

It's a big ask for the audience to make the imaginative leap and swallow this tale of something nasty in the woodshed. And it's a tribute to the quality of Dawn King's writing that the play succeeds brilliantly on several levels.  It's intentionally vague about time and place;  the accents are West Country, but no towns are mentioned to give us a fix on our location.  The period and clothing is sort of 20th century -- there is food rationing in the cities -- but there are echoes that come from further in the past, such as the farmer's muzzle-loading weapon.  The traverse set is admirably sparse, furnished with just a single chair.  Despite some spooky music, the play's mounting tension owes everything to its excellent construction, which brings the drama to a tense and pacy climax.  The key to its believability lies in the finely drawn characters.  Gyuri Sarossy and Kirsty Besterman, playing the Coveys, are totally convincing in their portrayal of a couple hovering between belief and disbelief and battling forces which are more powerful than they are.  Becci Gemmell is Sarah their neighbour, also a victim of an Orwellian system of thought control.  Tom Byam Shaw radiates an extraordinary intensity as William, the black-garbed seeker of foxes, the fanatic whose faith suddenly starts to waver.  The wordy phrases he uses ('quintessentially') convey the essence of a youth whose Achilles heel is that he has no experience of real life;  one can see him as a Cromwellian Bible-basher mortifying his own flesh, an Islamic fundamentalist, a Jesuit footsoldier of the Inquisition, or a Stalinist young commissar sent to hunt down Trotskyite deviations on a collective farm where the quotas are not being met.  The play allows us to make our own connections and read into what is happening on stage exactly what we want. 

Dawn King's writing is reminiscent of David Harrower's Knives in Hens in its intensity;  it also brings to mind Jez Butterworth's The Night Heron, another play about religious fanaticism.  It doesn't quite have the Shakespearean richness of Butterworth's Jerusalem, but it inhabits some of the same territory in its questioning of the mythic roots of the English countryside.  To write a play about foxes which leaps over the sterile debates about banning foxhunting is a great achievement;  this is a play about belief and rationality, about delusion, manipulation, suggestion and betrayal, about fear and honesty, about the creation of imaginary demons and the temptations of the flesh. 'If we lose, England will starve,' William tells his hosts, warning of 'the spectre of starvation that haunts our land'.  At times he is like a father confessor in his questioning, at times like a doctor when he interrogates the couple about how and when they have sex.  At one moment he refers to Judith as 'my patient'.

This play has come to the Finborough as the centrepiece of a festival of new writing organised by Papatango, a group new to me. I believe the National Theatre also had a hand in the process.  It runs until 23 December but if there is any justice in theatreland it will transfer to a bigger space.  2011 has been a great year for theatrical revivals, but for me at least, a disappointing year for new plays -- until this one came along.  I have no idea if there are any tickets left, but do try to see it.

Noises Off at the Old Vic

Forget Copenhagen. Come to that, you can forget Hamlet and King Lear as well.  Noises Off is not just Michael Frayn's masterpiece but possibly the best play ever written.  It is the Mount Everest of farce, so splendid that once you have climbed it there is nowhere else to go.  After running for years in the 1980s, it had a second revival in the 1990s at the National Theatre, which also had a long life in the West End and on tour.  Now it's been given another whirl at the Old Vic, directed by Linday Posner, and it proves to be as funny as ever. 

With Celia Imrie as the immortal sardine-carrier Mrs Clackett (a much better part than Cleopatra, in my view), it's tempting to say nothing could possibly go wrong with this production. After all, the text has been endlessly polished and rewritten by Frayn and the director of the NT production Jeremy Sams. But that would be to forget just how difficult it is to take the lines and the stage directions and reassemble them into a three-dimensional sequence of actions that has the audience rolling in the aisles.  The laugh lines in this show are unpredictable;  I was the prompter for a highly memorable amateur production of this play a few years ago, and I can testify to the fact that audiences vary enormously in their reactions; they all laugh, but at entirely different moments.  Given that unpredictability, and the fact that the Old Vic show was still in previews when I saw it, I think it may still have a little way to travel until the cast adjust their timing to secure maximum comic effect.  But it's still VERY good.  Michael Frayn's stroke of genius is to move the characters out of the traditional domestic setting where wives and husbands plot against each other, and into the theatre, where actors plot to deceive the audience that what they are doing is real in a nightly battle not just with slippery sardines and doors that fail to open and close, but also with each other.

While Celia Imrie as the old theatrical trouper Dotty, Janie Dee is terrific as bossy Belinda, the backstage head girl who keeps the fictional cast of Frayn's dodgy play-within-a-play ploughing ahead from Weston-super-Mare onwards.  Robert Glenister as Lloyd the director, Jamie Glover as Garry, Jonathan Coy as the hapless Freddie and Karl Johnson as the veteran thespian Selsdon all know exactly how to extract maximum comedy while acting with a straight face.  Amy Nuttall as the sexy-but-dim Brooke and Aisling Loftus as the hapless ASM Poppy don't quite bring the same level of comic flair to their parts -- at least not yet.  The key to making Brooke funny is to imitate what Mark Rylance did in Boeing-Boeing -- always be half a second behind the rest of the cast. 

After Act Two, in which the backstage mayhem seems to reach a climax, it can be difficult to maintain the comedy in Act Three, when the production of the play-within-a-play finally collapses in chaos.  But there's no anticlimax in this production.  Everyone should go and see this play, not just for a good night out but because farce is a great theatrical genre that often seems to be on life support.  Who has the writing skills to follow Frayn in this great tradition?   Richard Bean's clever makeover of Goldoni's comedy into the NT's current hit One Man, Two Guvnors shows that the art of sending audiences into paroxysms of laughter isn't quite dead.  Some may find Bean's play funnier; but if I was forced to take one of these two plays to a desert island, I think I would choose the Frayn.