EARTHQUAKES IN LONDON

EARTHQUAKES IN LONDON

Chelmsford Theatre Workshop at The Old Court

28.05.2015

Mike Bartlett's climate-change drama has big themes and a huge cast. It's an ambitious, thought-provoking piece of theatre which makes significant demands on any company bold enough to put it on stage.

CTW is at the top of its game in this production, directed by Danny Segeth with Vikki Pead. The performance space is remodelled to provide intimacy as well as epic scale, with two levels linked by a central staircase. In harmony with the eco message, everything used is recycled, and the live music [MD Cameron Price] is acoustic, organically integrated into the action.

The play explores the imminent crises of global warming and population explosion, through the eyes and the words of three generations. The time shifts from the sixties to a distant, dystopian future.

A big stretch technically, with so many areas to light, plus the band, and a screen to assist with narrative clarity.

Twelve excellent actors take on dozens of roles. Some, it is true, find their characters more successfully than others, but every one of them gives an impressively confident and truthful performance.

Laura Bradley plays the Liberty's girl as well as the old lady on Hampstead Heath, looking back to the days before Dunkirk as she awaits the gathering storm. Georgie Whittaker has an intriguing dual life as an autistic schoolboy whose role is dramatically redefined in one of several heart-stopping moments. Stefan Stuart is the impassioned protester Tom; Joe Kennedy a hopeless husband in a mid-life crisis.

The scientist who sells out to Robin Winder's polluting dollar is superbly done by James Christie. Naive and idealistic in his younger years, truculent and guilt-ridden in his sixties, it is an impeccably sustained, riveting performance, nicely offset by Helen Quigley as his long-suffering housekeeper. His three very different daughters, abandoned when their mother dies, are Evie Taylor, outstanding as an all too believable politician, Laura Hill as the troubled, and troublesome, wild child and Ruth Westbrook giving a searingly sincere performance in the pivotal role of Freya, the middle sister who's pregnant with the next generation, but feels overwhelmingly inadequate, to the despair of her husband [Ryan Read-Gatterell].

Secure versatility from Kelly McGibney and newcomer Tom Tull as, amongst others, the minister's PA, an aviophobic businessman and a polar bear.

It's a long show, and occasionally words are lost to pace and naturalism, but a seamless succession of short scenes sustains the impetus, and the intimate encounters are contrasted with some superlative physical ensembles.

Image from an original photograph by Tom Tull

EARTHQUAKES IN LONDON

EARTHQUAKES IN LONDON

National Theatre at the Cottesloe

21.08.10

I escape the V Festival in Chelmsford by going clubbing in the Cottesloe. The National's poor relation has undergone a transformation, in Miriam Buether’s radical design, into a trendy bar, with stools and a standing area for the braver punters. There are videos all around the walls, and two strange widescreen letter box stages halfway up the end walls.

The occasion is Mike Bartlett's new piece – twice as long as his previous shows, and ambitious in its intellectual and emotional scope. More does not necessarily mean better, and I wonder how essential the production numbers are. But the playwright explicitly encourages the director, Rupert [Enron] Goold - this is a co-production with Headlong – to throw everything at the piece. So we have a burlesque strip show, sinister mums with Silver Cross prams, clubbers and lowlife crowding the S-shaped catwalk which snakes the length of the auditorium.

This is theatre for people who like their eclectic playlist on shuffle. Me, I prefer standard sonata form, but I could not help being swept along by the excesses of the production, and of course by the narrative as it unfolded.

Three sisters are disowned by their climate scientist father, who thinks it would have been better had they never been born. Watching their lives unravel, you had to sympathise with his view. The youngest, excellently if uncomfortably played by Jessica Raine, is a wild child, permanently, confrontationally unhappy – memorably, she seduces her own brother-in-law, an impressive Tom Goodman-Hill. Freya [Anna Madely] is pregnant, but desperately unsure whether she can bring a child into this doomed world. The elder sister [a strong, cold Lia Williams] is a Lib Dem minister in the coalition government. Her portfolio is the environment, and like her father she is tempted by the corporate dollar.

The whole seventeen-strong company is excellent – Maggie Service has some lovely cameos as a dismissed employee, a saleswoman in an unrecognisable Liberty, and, touchingly, a war widow nostalgic for a vanished world. Bill Paterson is the curmudgeonly paterfamilias, preaching Armaggedon as he watches the wildlife and waits for Gaia to redress the global balance.

The “Matter of Life and Death” finale sits strangely with the visceral energy of the rest, but there's no doubting the power of the piece, and its timely message.