SMALL PEOPLE, BIG PLAY
A hot summer wedding-day. The bride Sylvia is a bag of nerves, big sister Hazel competently combing and marshalling her teenage and smaller daughters while dismissive of the marriage – he’s not a Nottinghamshire lad, just one of those Poles, whose language that “looks like a wifi password”. The third sister Maggie has been away, the one defector from the tight but struggling clan in a blighted former pit village. Enter Auntie Carol with her rollers still in, dating her prime years nicely with “any time I eat a crumpet I miss Kilroy”. The women’s chat about lip-liner and Brazilian waxes provokes helpless gales of audience laughter to match their wedding-day mood. The line “Next door’s got a sex pond” forever skewers hot-tub oneupmanship.
Beth Steel’s writing is a firework show, sparkling as any sitcom but artful, gradually drawing out differences and family bonds, preparing us for conflagration later. Sinead Matthews’ gruff uncertain dreamy Sylvia is the vulnerable one, Lisa McGrillis a sassy confident Maggie, Lucy Black’s Hazel a brave-face wife who works warehouse shifts. Her husband John is suddenly unemployed, depressed. Lorraine Ashbourne as Auntie Carol is glorious, determined on fun and fearfully prone to speak truth to the next generation. When the men appear to be marshalled to the venue they too are defined with deft flicks of language and gesture: Alan Williams the patriarch Tony , an old miner; Derek Riddell the morose John, Philip Whitchurch as Uncle Pete who no longer speaks to Tony in picket-line bitterness from forty years back, but is clearly being made to behave at a niece’s wedding by the formidable Auntie Carol.
You have to feel for the Polish outsider. Marek is a bluff Mark Wootoon, radiating simple kindly warmth as a man who came over on a Megabus with a few pounds, did “shit jobs” in abattoir and up scaffolding, and built his own business. He has little time for modern complainers. “You have to decide if you are a victim or superior, can’t be both”. At the top table of this increasingly tense wedding (the sweaty heat is brilliantly evoked) he vainly offers both vodka and a job to John , tries to tolerate Hazel’s racist sniping and gently points out that the waitress is Lithuanian ,which is not the same as Polish. His Catholic mother has not come over to approve this culturally alien marriage. Good old Tony points out that he worked with plenty of Poles in the pits, after the war. 14-year-old Leanne (who will cause explosive trouble later) has gone vegetarian for the polar bears and evokes a teenage sense of cosmic global doom. This is assisted by Paule Constable’s lighting and Samal Blak’s simple set: the great green arena is both dancefloor and planet, the glittering witch-ball above sometimes the threat of Oppenheimer’s thousand suns…
For alongside the realism of a struggling working-class community and its incomers (Steel, remember, wrote the marvellous WONDERLAND about the miners’ strike) there is an understated but powerful sense of a wider, cosmic questioning, a deep human need for meaning: like Jerusalem it is both about England and mysterious immensity. There is humour and thwarted love and social observation but also wider yearning. Little Sarah wants to be an astronaut and believes she will; dull unhappy John loved drawing, wished art had been his life; Tony collects stones, fossils, tells their 480-million year story to his little granddaughter. You can go for a merry evening of family intrigue and a wedding brawl but come away looking up at the stars, reminded that we are passing ants in a marvellous universe, for all our heroisms and idiocies.
That somehing of this quality should be in the little Dorfman might be surprising, except that it so perfectly suits its flexible studio quality: the wedding dinner is at a round table on a slow revolve, every nuance catchable. Director Bijan Sheibani keeps the pace up with a series of verbal of coups de theatre, Steel providing cattleprod shocks to any sitcom complacency. Not least Uncle Paul’s sudden recitation of the names of all the closed pits, Marek’s volcanic performance of a wedding song, a Tarzan tour de force by Alan Williams, and Auntie Carol’s post- vomit reminiscences “last time I got drunk on voldka I wiped me bottom wi’ candyfloss..pink, see..”
It is also one of those plays where you spend the interval breathing a silent prayer that the second half doesnt fade to melodrama or a predictable political message. But it never does. I rate the experience alongside the first time I saw JERUSALEM.
nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 16 March
Rating five
theatreCat 