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5. Bedroom Farce

London,

A sea of despair, farce and black comedy

By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard  24.01.08

Usually regarded as a rest home for elderly plays of the derriere-garde persuasion, the Haymarket is being buffeted by winds of change under Jonathan Kent's year-long artistic directorship.

Edward Bond, that now unfashionable Socialist playwright whose famous Royal Court plays in the Sixties and Seventies offered savage anatomies of England, sounds an unlikely attraction for West End audiences. Yet Kent's revival of this absurd black comedy, with its abrupt oscillations between farce, comedy and despair in an Edwardian East Coast village, ought to prove a comic and poignant attraction.

Old-fashioned Haymarket habitués will be reassured by the sighting of Dame Eileen Atkins, adorned in a purple feather atop a fur hat and a costume of mauve sobriety. Decked out as some rural Lady Bracknell, Dame Eileen's grand lady of the manor - Mrs Rafi - rains down a little, light contempt upon inferior materials unveiled for her condescending gaze by David Haig's subservient Hatch, the draper. She behaves as if convinced money has ensured the world is not so much her oyster as a servant on 24-hour call. The delectable Dame Eileen wears a withering glare and assumes the voice of brisk authority to the comic manner born, even if she misses Mrs Rafi's rueful sense of personal isolation. The hilarious Marcia Warren as her put-upon companion strikes self-pitying notes.

This, though, being Edward Bond terrain, an angrier critique of society is fashioned than ever found in Wilde's drama. Paul Brown's design, with views of bleak coastland and Edwardian interiors, sets in context disturbing visions of a coastal community in 1907 - Liberal Britain in brief flowering mode. It's a world beset by grief, anxiety and madness.

The first storm-tossed scene, which Kent has inexplicably cut, presents young Will staggering to the shore, vainly begging for help to save his friend Colin, after their boat has capsized. He finds none from David Burke's drunken hermit Evens or Haig's half-demented draper, who believes aliens are poised to land in the world and that Will must be the first of the invaders. Then heavy guns sound far off. The scene - at once comic, ominous and terrible - sets the play's tone. Here are people variously at one remove from grim reality, ruined by it or eager to escape. Hatch, the play's chief victim, convinces a crew of simple boys that the aliens are coming and is financially ruined by Mrs Rafi. Haig puts on another of his spectacular displays of rage and desperation - a wonderful comic/pathetic turn which climaxes in his crazed stabbing of a corpse.

Mrs Rafi, cocooned in opulence with loyal ladies attending her ridiculous amateur dramatic afternoons, relishes Colin's cliff-edge funeral even as it degenerates into a mess of human ashes flung while brawling. Evens sees humans as strangers in their own world. No wonder Mariah Gale's memorable, grief-struck Rose and Harry Lloyd's fine Will, who learns hard lessons about life, end up by leaving town. An optimistic escape? The Great War lies but seven years ahead of them.

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