Chester Little Theatre open their new season with Benefactors, a play by Michael Frayn that is set in the 1960s, was made in the ‘80s and which seems to find its perfect moment in time with each successive revival.
David is an architect with high ideals, commissioned with designing a new local authority housing project to regenerate the slums of Basuto Road. His plans begin with a neat arrangement of the sort of good quality low-rise accommodation that communities are always being promised, but with each successive draft he sends to the council they come back to him with more and more constraints on the space. Squeezed into an ever-decreasing footprint, his utopian vision is forced upwards until he is finally forced to design a pair of 50 storey towers.
Yes, the play is partly about the short-sightedness of town planners who repeatedly ignore warning signs, but all the talk of progressive collapse, with its recollections of Ronan Point (and subsequently of course the World Trade Centre) become a metaphor for what is happening to the relationship between David and his wife Jane, as well as that of their neighbours Sheila and Colin.
Colin is a journalist-turned-activist who makes it his life’s work to oppose the new building programme in between belittling his long suffering wife. Played here with waspish venom by Harper Oldale, Colin positively drips with acid. The play is very wordy indeed, the lion’s share of the text seeming to land on Rob Turner who plays David. This is a complex individual who is treading more than one tightrope in his life, and Turner negotiates the twists and turns of his travails with barely a foot misplaced.
All four players step in and out of the action at times to deliver direct address to the audience, but it is the two wives who carry the bulk of this backward looking narrative, effectively placing the rest of the play into flashback. Outwardly downtrodden, they eventually rise to become the drivers of the piece. These are the sort of steel-willed women that David Hare and Alan Bennett often pen so well, and indeed Benefactors has a style that sits somewhere between those two writers.
Alison Knott and Fiona Wheatcroft are Jane and Sheila. Knott brings an aloof, other-worldly thoughtfulness to Jane’s monologues, seeming almost to stand outside the action even when in the thick of it. Jane is, of course, an anthropologist, and she appears throughout to be studying life rather than living it. Wheatcroft meanwhile steers a sure course with Sheila, from the character’s wordless beginnings to her growing forthrightness as the piece progresses.
John McGinn’s set design has the living space of these two couples almost floating in a black void, enabling the narrative segments to encircle the main action. Director Jane Barth keeps an eagle eye on both the dramatic pace and the finely balanced wit. This is not the sort of farce that those familiar with Frayn’s Noises Off might expect, and the much darker comedy of the play simmers beneath the surface. Barth however succeeds in teasing it out of the dense text so that we feel every prick of the barbed humour.
Our four protagonists’ lives may be as precarious as a house of cards but this production is as solidly built as they come.
The cast of Benefactors - © Stephen Cain Photography
This review was originally written for publication by Good News Liverpool
Comments
Post a Comment