ANYTHING CAN WASH UP ON THE NORTH SEA COAST …
Robin Brooks and director Fiona McAlpine mischievously bill this eccentric, enlivening short play as “a shocking sordid seaside thriller”, so I expected broad comedy larks. But in the event it’s more like a version of Henry James’ Aspern Papers, as if recreated under the influence of a cold salt swim and a bucket of heavily laced alcoholic cocoa . Very seaside, and actually remarkable and well-disguisedly intelligent fun.
An American academic (played with particular aplomb by Charlotte Parry) swishes into offeason Southwold in her Burberry, patronizingly adoring it for quaintness and writerly peace. She is determined to lodge in the house of an old, old lady who used to mix with the likes of E.M.Forster and Ben Britten. And who may have been the lover of a minor lesbian performance-poet of the last century: a figure long obscure but suddenly fashionable in US academe’s quest for feminist diversity.
The daughter Violet (Lydia McNulty) is prickly , and prone to deliver short depressing performance-poems herself. The apparent granddaughter Maud (Charlie Cameron) is naive and shy, but between them they occasionally wheel out the grande dame – dark glasses, huge hat, blankets, croaking voice – to demand £1000 a week for the basement flat.
So in two short and fascinating acts (whole thing is two hours including interval) Parry stalks around, mainly in front of the curtains, chats up shy Maud and goes sea-swimming with her. She is once or twice granted a snapped grunting audience with old Evelyn, and becomes increasingly suspicious that she herself may be being fooled or haunted. As many do, she starts to feel that Southwold itself is actually a stage set the bathing-huts as changing rooms, the sea a backdrop and the people self-possessedly odd: the bewildered visitor is the sole and baffled audience.
What she wants, of course, is a possible cache of letters and tapes of the fabled poet performing her own works. Do they still exist? WHere is the old woman hiding them, can they be in the elaborate escritoire (the only set, suddenly revealed by the curtain) and why won’t the old bat let Harvard or somewhere have them for yet another slightly tedious book to be written by our thwarted heroine?
Suspicions rise, until in the second half a lovely coup-de-theatre brings a proper gasp. And not-quite-all is revealed. It’s a hoot. Only cavil would be sometimes for the two younger cast to be a touch more audible, especially as the short performance-poems spouted by Violet sound quite bad enough to provide amusement (anyone who’s been to a poetry-slam in Aldeburgh knows what I mean)
southwoldartscentre.co.uk to Saturday. Cheap as chips and just as much fun.
rating 3
theatreCat 