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One act or another
Noel Coward's Tonight at 8.30
Malvern Festival Theatres
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This week’s ‘cocktail’ of Noel Coward
one-act plays provides a unique and unusual theatrical experience,
performed by the English Touring Theatre in conjunction with the
Nuffield Theatre.
The opportunity to see nine one-act plays in one
week, three at each performance, provides a fascinating variety and
taste of Coward’s extraordinary versatility. Last night (Wednesday
night) we were presented with a triplet entitled DINNER: ‘Ways and
Mean’, ‘Fumed Oak’ and ‘Still Life’.
The three plays are very contrasted: we move from
the French Riviera where a couple of frivolous members of the spoilt
upper middle class are struggling for cash on their travels, to the very
ordinary working class home of a family in south London, on to a
refreshment room in a railway station where a couple of separately
married individuals meet and fall in love.
The contrasting social contexts, characters and
accents are presented in a set that is skilfully adapted by the designer
to provide an excellent and varied backdrop for each of the three
pieces. This is sensitively complemented by the lighting and sound
effects.
Ways and Means is light and humorous: a
couple who have wasted their money in gambling and frivolous expenditure
are arguing and worrying about how they can continue their continental
tour without the necessary funds while needing to maintain face in front
of their ‘friends’ and around the villa.
Their verbal sparring is quite intense at times
though we are increasingly aware that they care for each other and are
actually close. At night a burglar breaks into their apartment and turns
out to be a chauffeur of their acquaintance and they persuade him to
help them by stealing from another resident, and then sharing the
proceeds before tying them up and making them appear to be victims of a
violent break-in.
ENTERTAINING PIECE
The gently farcical nature of the plot and the
wittiness of the dialogue make it a very amusing, clever, superficial
but entertaining piece.
Fumed Oak presents us with a
domestic family group: mother and father, grandmother and daughter. In
the first half the father/husband says almost nothing but in the second
half, having had a bit to drink, in an unprecedented outburst he erupts
and releases all his anger and frustrations against the three
generations of women with whom he has shared his life, exploding in an
irrepressible flow of angry and sarcastic vitriol before leaving them
for a new life somewhere else. In this marriage there is huge gulf
between the couple.
The shocking nature of his language in insulting
the women provides a good deal of humour, especially as the three women
are caricatured as extremely irritating and deserving of much that he
hurls at them.
Still Life was later developed into the
film Brief Encounter and presents us with a man and a woman who
meet ‘by accident’ in a railway station and go on to develop a strong
passion for each other. However they both wrestle with the guilt and
shame of knowing that it is a betrayal of their married spouses and
families, and eventually their consciences and guilt win through and
they experience the anguish of the final parting.
This is a much more profound and serious
psychological exploration of a couple’s feelings than we see in the
other two plays. This intense and passionate relationship is conducted
in a context where, in marked contrast, the manageress of the tea bar
and the other minor characters present us with more superficially
explored relationships that are amusing and lightly comic.
The pace and energy of the cast is very
well-maintained throughout the three plays; the characterisations are
colourful and entertaining, and among them Kirsty Besterman and Giuri
Sarossy stand out as excellent performers – the latter took the lead in
two of the plays on this particular evening. The accents of the tearoom
manager and the father in ‘Fumed Oak’ are not quite consistently
maintained, but lines are delivered clearly throughout and Noel Coward’s
wit is very successfully conveyed. Blanche McIntyre’s direction is
assured and achieves distinct pace and tones in each of the plays. The
humour in the plays comes from the witty dialogue, the interplay between
the colourful characters, the use of dramatic irony and the amusing
twists in the plots of the first two plays in particular.
The audience numbers were disappointing and I was
left wondering Perhaps there is a limited appeal in the short one-act
plays for the general public who enjoy one coherent story running
through the whole evening. It is a shame as the brilliant wit of Coward
and the tremendous skills and energy of the cast deserve more!
Tim Crowe
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