The Stage

Radio review: Drama

Published Friday 30 April 2010 at 14:26 by Moira Petty

When a play has three authors, does one type while two furiously pace the room, spewing out competing lines of dialogue?

Somehow, with And So Say All of Us, Dan Rebellato, Linda McLean and Duncan MacMillan have produced a seamless and topical satire on the increasing engagement with our private life at the expense of public life.

The play opens on election day but sensation, thought and foreboding are reserved for the domestic sphere.

One couple, (the husky-voiced Louisa Lytton, and Derek Riddell) channel their frustrations with life through the unlovely bricks and mortar of their nineties new-build home.

Searching for “authenticity,” they gradually erase their home until they are standing in rubble. The sentiment spreads and the neighbours follow suit. Meanwhile the couple next door (softly-spoken Amelia Bullmore, and Michael Begley) are waiting for the birth of their first baby but she refuses to go into labour, deciding the womb is the best long term home for the baby.

Bathed in these intensely suffocating emotions, neither couple has the inclination to vote. Their feelings are mirrored nationwide and no one turns out leading to scenes of high hilarity in which a coalition group is formed and they nominate wilder and wilder candidates for PM.

They are in danger of agreeing on MasterChef presenters John Torode and Greg Wallace in a job share, when someone suggests Winston Churchill, dead, okay, but surrounded by a cabinet of “all the talents”. Shortly afterwards the sky falls in.

I suspect this play was written long before it became clear that the current general election would be so unpredictable, with an outcome which may alter the face of British politics.

Nevertheless, with Alice Trumean’s apocalyptic music and Eloise Whitmore’s evocation of a world in chaos, this was a timely parody of the consequences of going against Donne’s edict that no man is an island.

An interesting contrast was provided by a delicious production of Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, her 1963 novel famously rejected by her publishers and only released in 1982 after her death.

Queen’s Park, an up-and-coming north west London suburb, is being gentrified by the incoming middle classes who put clipped bay trees in pots outside. It could be the eighties. But no matter how desperately they search for love and friendship and a sense of belonging, it is clear that they also look beyond their immediate environs.

Their egotism is limited by the feeling that there are worlds beyond their world. Director Chris Wallis expertly juggled the various characters, including the spinster played with aplomb by Sophie Thompson (how I hope she gets to be the bride some day) and the fragrant librarian (Raquel Cassidy.)

The script was dotted with Pym’s timeless and piercing insights into the human psyche. Equally fascinating were the of their era class-ridden social gatherings, which were positively Austen-like as unmarried ladies circled the 30-something marriageable anthropologist (Ben Crowe).

Tom Courtenay’s performance was gruffly underplayed and all the more elegiac for it as the 110-year old man recalling old amours in The Six Loves of Billy Binns. Richard Lumsden’s play was all the more epic for the minor tragedies it chronicled.

Skins’ writer Ed Hines went for gladiatorial horror in We Outnumber You in which an oil company’s sponsorship of a new zoo turns into a blood bath.

Reconstructing the events through recordings made on the night gave a sense of jagged realism but the eco-warriors were no more in possession of the moral high ground than the oil giant, despite Kenneth Cranham’s chilling performance as its boss, leaving any conclusion in the air.

PROGRAMMES

And So Say All of Us, R3, Sunday, May 2

An Unsuitable Attachment R4, from Monday, April 26

The Six Loves of Billy Binns R4, Wednesday, April 21

We Outnumber You, R4, Friday, April 23