Review: Plays East at the Arcola Theatre, Hackney
Play East 8th March 2009
Arcola Theatre
Hackney
Purgatory by Steven Berkoff. Dir. Hamish Pirie
Flowers in her Hair by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Dir. Fiona Morrell
The List by David Eldridge, Dir. James Grieve
The dark but cavernous space of the Arcola’s studio theatre provides an intimate setting for three new shorts which all take the importance of being witnessed as their theme.
Repeated three times on one Sunday afternoon, the programme opens with a dark comedy from Steven Berkoff. At times reminiscent of Pinter and Orton, the play opens with an out-of-work actor arriving to request lodgings from a well-worn land lady. The no-nonsense older woman is brilliantly played as a true Eastender by Linda Robson, incidentally instructing the forlorn thespian he should try to get a part on the soap. The Anonymous Actor with a passion for Shakespeare, his Landlady and the ‘crazy tart from next door’ all struggle to express how they feel and are reprimanded as soon as they begin. The short production cycle of this performance is evident – at times the actors are clutching scripts – but the comic timing is immaculate and the characters evoke our sympathy for their short-comings in the restrictive world they inhabit.
A more contemporary mood is struck by Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s ‘Flowers in Her Hair’. Sexually confused Ivan and voyeuristic Laura are meeting for a blind-date coffee. We witness them as they listen to each other, depicting their inability to engage with others until an unspoken understanding seems to have been struck. The direction is simple and focused, with all the action taking place on a single table, raised on a thrust stage which cuts an angle through the performance space. Both Simon Poland and Pandora Colin are utterly compelling as the withdrawn protagonists and are touching as they delicately manoeuvre around romantic and social longings.
Eldridge’s ‘The List’ is set firmly in modern day East London and draws its characters from Hackney’s transient demographic. A woman dies and leaves behind her heavy-drinking gambler of a husband and two successful children. The tensions of conflicting aspirations are borne out through the reading of a list written by the deceased mother shortly before she died. As her family struggles to deal with the revelations of how she viewed them and what motivated her (one of her happiest moments was when she recently ‘nicked a bike’) the audience is presented with a picture of how differently Hackney’s older and younger generations view the borough. Madeline Herrington is particularly strong as the banker daughter. It is easy to see why she and her equally stubborn father, convincingly portrayed by Paul Moriarty, leave each other exacerbated. But as more of her mother’s thoughts and reflections are laid out into the theatre space, it is as if the woman has come back to life to remind them who they really are.
Interview with Linda Robson
After the show I caught up with one of the stars, actress Linda Robson, who told me about how the plays fitted into a cultural environmental project.
