Drama
Aren't train journeys great? You sit down, pop your bag on the luggage rack, and start to do the crossword. Someone else comes into the compartment and chats to you. You have to admit they're a bit odd. Then they draw a gun on you.
That's the premise of Johnny Speight's intriguing little drama, The Compartment. Speight, the author of Till Death Us Do Part, investigates the nature of the outsider and of insanity. The play begins gently and amusingly. Aled Roberts's 'Man' is happily settling down with the Financial Times when a 'Young Man' (Matthew Jones) enters the carriage. The Young Man is nervous, on edge, eager to please, and Jones captures his nature in a boyish, disarmingly effete performance. The comedy is Alan Bennett with a dash of Pinter: Jones's haltingly pedantic monologue about the use of luggage racks is particularly entertaining.
The tone begins slowly to darken, and director Kate Sagovsky paces her production intelligently, unafraid to make judicious use of silence and stillness. Jones's eccentric pedantry becomes an obsessive mania. He accuses The Man of having "an important-looking face", and repeats the phrase again and again as he becomes increasingly threatening. Then he draws a gun. The status roles are reversed - Roberts's establishment figure is forced to cower before this young man with a gun.
The premiere of The Compartment in the early 1960s starred Michael Caine as The Young Man, and perhaps the play needs his particular blend of control and menace. Jones's performance is nicely textured and sensitive, but he is at his best before he turns nasty and gets out the gun. He keeps the tone light and playful, but there's a lack of the latent threat, which would make the play ignite. Roberts works hard in the unrewarding role of The Man, but doesn't quite manage to communicate completely the impression of a middle aged man. That said, the two performances may develop over the next week.
Ultimately, the play is a diverting but insubstantial work. The sparklingly witty dialogue lacks the grit of a major dialogue-writer in this school like Beckett or Pinter. Too often, we continue to laugh when we should feel threatened. Nevertheless, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and arresting production, and I've no doubt we'll be seeing a lot more of the talented all-fresher team over the next couple of years.
The rest is silence. Hamlet's last words are taken literally by Beckett, who makes drama out of silence. Toby Chapman's Krapp is a meticulous study of nothingness. He is an old, withered man, surviving on nothing but bananas and old tape recordings of his own voice with which he interacts - the diary of a man who has nothing to say. He slips up on his own banana skin - a hilarious moment of understated comedy; he slips up on his own waste - a dreadful moment of profound tragedy. Toby Chapman's performance is carefully orchestrated by Thom Glover. There is a distinct and unnerving rhythm to his idleness. His mannerisms speak for his age and his wasted condition, like the embittered professors on History Today. This is a man who never sings; a man who feels "less alone" in "all this darkness"; a man whose only novelty is a "new retrospect".
The second of these monologues, taken from The Age of Consent, is linked to the first by a tape. Timmy, an adolescent child murderer (based on the Bulger killers), records himself on tape. Yet unlike Krapp, he will not hoard his retrospective musings; he is told to destroy them. Peter Morris's script is close to the bone. Timmy is just a kid, although he is now nineteen; yet he insists he is "clever": he can read. Like Krapp's Last Tape, this monologue is about a man cut off from social reality. Timmy doesn't know how to interact with people. He has never been allowed to. He confesses that Playstation warps his sense of reality. After hours of playing GoldenEye he becomes paranoid that gunmen are hiding from him, that surveillance cameras are watching him. He has been institutionalized to think that the cameras are now in his head. He is trapped - forever.
Mark Grimmer's performance is outstanding. At one point, Timmy tries to explain why he did what he did. But he can't. "Nothing." That's all he can say. He rages, he tries to find some reason, some "motive"; but life is not a game of Cluedo where everything can be accounted for and worked out by a logical process of elimination. Grimmer's traumatic surge of helplessness and remorse is intensely moving. We pity this kid, we laugh at his jokes about masturbation and his fat minder, Janet 'The Gannet'. We feel at once responsible and absolved from blame. Yet still he finds beauty in urban decay and the rotting past. "I'm not depressed," he concludes, "I'm just realistic."
The old idea of the mad scientist takes on new dimensions in The Physicists. Dürrenmatt's absurdist black comedy features three of them in a mental institution: Ernesti, who thinks he is Albert Einstein, Beutler, who thinks he is Isaac Newton and Möbius, who believes that King Solomon talks to him. However, all is not quite what it seems and a series of twists and turns reveals just how these split personalities are linked to nuclear fission...
Written in 1962 in the wake of the atomic bomb and against the background of the Cold War, the play taps into contemporary fear that scientific development was outstripping man's ability to use it for good. The danger and responsibility of scientific knowledge weigh so heavily on Möbius (Dom Smith) that he has taken refuge in the hospital for fifteen years. He has severed ties with his nuclear family in order to protect mankind from the consequences of his nuclear discoveries. In the asylum he grows close to one of the nurses caring for him and when love enters into the equation it sets off a chain reaction that can only lead to murder.
The difficulty with staging this play successfully lies in balancing the comedy of feigned madness with the darker psychological dilemmas it poses. This production manages the comic side reasonably well, with some laughs at Einstein (Ed Chappel) and Newton (James Corbet Burcher) guaranteed. However, the emotional anguish of the characters is less convincing, and the love scene between the nurse and the physicist could do with a little more chemistry. The enthusiastic energy of the cast and director is what saves the production and The Physicists remains an amusing show, despite its overall lack of momentum.
22nd Jan 2004