by London theater going gargantuan. Is this a reaction against fast-paced, not-breathing-as-any-air-for-too-long pandemic dramas? Is there a need for overarching narratives, a hope that there is something that will last beyond an individual life or a government? This month, A Long Day’s Journey into the Night it took over long stretches of family memory and Game Kings Player Shakespeare’s vast history was condensed. Now London Tide cope with the boom and despair of the capital. Another three hour evening here.
Ben Power has adapted Dickens’ great talent Our Mutual Friends, effectively stuffing heiress-marriage-murder plots into a quick series of scenes on Bunny Christie’s obsidian set. He tilted the action towards the moral and social concerns of the novel rather than its fugitive weirdness, gave the female characters more opinions and cut some satirical glory: the nouveaux-riches Veneerings don’t make the cut. One of the main threats of the Dickens stage is avoided – a reduction to a series of capering grotesques known as Dickensian. Bella Maclean and Tom Mothersdale are particularly incisive: Maclean with a crystalline voice and troubled humor; Mothersdale uses his ability to make the case to a very strong standard.
Missing is the fluid alchemy of the novel, the perpetual change not only of character but of place.
However Ian Rickson’s production aims for more than the occasional accusation, to explore city life unfettered by character. It is not lively enough to achieve this. The boldest stroke is to include songs by PJ Harvey and Power. Accompanied by Ian Ross (piano and guitars), Alex Lupo (drum vehicle) and Sarah Anderson (keyboards), the numbers run through the evening: choral, solo, accusatory, persuasive, melancholic, often with a beat like the stamping of feet . . They provide a dark, rough undertow but don’t overwhelm the drama. Rather, like a tide, they only come again.
Christie’s series – with iron lighting rigs that rise and fall – are very attractive, when they don’t look fancy in a 21st century loft. The evening would have benefited from relying more on Jack Knowles’s lighting – vibrant and brooding – and less on characters reporting to the audience on the blood-red sun. Missing is the fluid alchemy of the novel, the perpetual change not only of character but of place and, crucially, of trade and finance. After all, it was Dickens’s delight to depict the wealth of the city as being based on London’s great dust heap. The dirty lucre indeed.
American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins makes it his business to roast old theater nuts. I Appropriate, solved the idea of family ghosts. I The Octoroon, he reworked a 19th century melodrama and got actors whited up. I The Arrival, which director Eric Ting staged for the first time in New York last year, takes on the well-worn theme of reunions – in this case, former students reuniting 20 years after graduation. . Such meetings are always critical to unwelcome exposure. But the Jacobs-Jenkins surprises are of an unusual order. It surrounds down-to-earth encounters with a nimbus of otherworldly uncertainty.
The first few hours are extremely exciting. Arnulfo Maldonado’s design, coolly lit by Natasha Chivers, evokes familiarity with corrosion. In the center of the homey porch, with a swinging bench and a tired American flag, there is a door, like another proscenium arch, with a gauze screen: as people move through it they seem to be ghosted. When Anthony Welsh, the easygoing anchor of the evening, speaks, he has a double voice: his words echo as if they were being broadcast. It is two things: a man maturing and the incorporation, well, that would be a spoiler … let’s say, something disturbing.
The play, set just after the pandemic, lives up to the threat of its title, catching a group sliding from childhood to middle age, from easy company to danger, from life to death. Every character has an obligatory confessional moment under a sudden spotlight. Strangely, despite these staged theatrical events, the action always feels realistic. Yolanda Kettle – an ex-policeman’s wife who, she explains, didn’t really storm the Capitol – is particularly good at carrying a blinkered gay arch across the aisle. She comes to hug a jar of goodies the size of a pork roast: “I bought a snack,” she says.
The dialogue is easy to follow, as the group drifts into their shared, yet penetrating, old feelings. “Hide too much and you will be the one in hiding,” says one character. Who wouldn’t be proud to write that? Or think of the moment two people listen to a series of sounds until they go out of range of the human ear. A character who is going blind explains that she finds it difficult to move around due to a lack of depth perception. Depth perception is exactly what Jacobs-Jenkins brings to the stage.
Talented but all over the place, Gunter, co-created by Lydia Higman, Julia Grogan and Rachel Lemon, and premiered in Edinburgh last year, stages episodes from an arresting piece of history from 1604: killing at a football match; appointed spell; witch hunt The ending of the witch concept is not as surprising as the staging suggests – sometimes the message overwhelms the story – but the energy is intertwined with the drumming and electric guitar, the resonance of the today with videos of the crowds rising, and a taste of it. Spookiness of the 17th century shared with animal masks: a particularly unnerd salivating wolf. Applause is also due, for knowingly turned, sad but true rhymes that probably equate to “split ends” and “friendless”.
Star ratings (out of five)
London Tide ★★★
The Arrival ★★★★
Gunter ★★★
