SECRETS AND MEMORIES IN A WASTE OF WATERS
You can’t fault the atmosphere: Jasmine Swan’s set takes you straight to the wide skies and muddy, reedy mystery of Breydon Water, where the Norfolk and Suffolk Broadland rivers meet and strange old structures rot quietly into history . Structures like the titular tide-jetty – designed to guide faster water round a bend and help scour depth in the channel. Rushes sway before a vague watery horizon, baulks and planks of wood become jetty , houseboat and bank as the cast nimbly move them, often silhouetted, lost spirits of the past. Chris Warner’s songs become harsh primitive harmonies and when Tucky the marshman, balancing on his punt, points his fowling-gun out over us, his targeted bird is heard plashing right behind us in the artful soundscape. Mesmerizing too is a mimetic opening and repeated sequence choreographed by Simon Carroll-Jone: a remembered drowning. Benjamin Teare moves in imaginary water with the terrible balletic grace of a corpse, gently through with struggling, returning to nature.
This is the world, finely realized, of Tony Ramsay’s new play, which follows his excellent John Clare one some years back. For all that, I salute it. It was also pleasing, on a particularly disastrous Brexit-news day, to join the sigh of relief at Tucky’s repeated motto “When you can’t fix everythin’, you fix what you can”. Westminster, please copy. However, it has sacrificed too much storytelling to atmospherics, and dangerously lost some clarity too, which director Scott Hurran could easily remedy. In the interval there was a touch too much anxious mutual questioning going on over the ice creams, as to who was dead and who was related and why everyone seemed so tense. The back-story – of three friends long ago, two men in love with the same woman – does become clear, but the reveals are late. So the prevailing unease gives us a touch of Cold Comfort Farm. Or, more positively, of Wuthering Heights here . Wuthering Broads.
Abe Buckoke was much to my taste as Tucky, long-haired, knowing more than he speaks, very Norfolk; he is a cause of fascination to young Anna (Megan Valentine) and of unease to her mother Eliza, one of the original three friends (Laura Costello, the best singer of them all, beautiful). Her stepfather is the stern river-engineer Morton (who Benjamin Teare doubles) , a decent if socially dull man stuck in a sexless marriage with Eliza. He is full of pronouncements about the importance of imposing precision, measurement and planning on the unruly water-world, as he cannot on the still more unruly emotions of his women. There is a subplot about corruption in the timber business which, to be honest, only dilutes the dreamlike feeling of the music, the sound and the drownings.
A particularly tricky problem for Teare as Morton is that the slightly stilted, formal speech of a Victorian paterfamilias is devilish hard to imbue with emotional energy (note how Trollope and even Austen lines get fiddled with, sneakily, on TV). The women do better, sounding both in period and actually credible, but the stiffness imposed on Teare strikes a distracting note , Still, it’s early in the tour and there are ways to make that settle. And the atmosphere is worth it.
easternangles.co.uk touring to 1 June
rating three 
theatreCat 