The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Published Tuesday 23 January 2007 at 12:35 by William McEvoy

Brecht remains a challenge for today’s directors. His plays often have an axe to grind and his ideas about breaking down illusion in theatre can feel soulless. But director Sean Holmes brings a great lightness of touch to this youthful, modern-feeling production. It combines moments of real theatrical inventiveness, a quirky visual imagination and an array of weird and wonderful gadgets and sound effects.

Frank McGuinness’s version of Brecht’s 1944 play highlights the plainspeaking eloquence of peasant girl, Grusha, who goes on trial for kidnapping a child she has in fact risked her life to save. She is strong-willed yet tender in Cath Whitefield’s splendid performance, the moral still-point in a turning world of corrupt judges, drunken monks and heartless lawyers.

Musical interludes punctuate the action, often sung Franz Ferdinand-style by Leo Chadburn to narrate the story. At times grating, Chadburn can also show impeccable comic timing, as do other cast members in numerous bouts of physical comedy and visual gags. Nicolas Tennant’s boozy Azdak, half Rab C Nesbitt and half Steptoe junior, remains a wonderful character, slurring his words but with a razor-sharp mind.

The slapstick and sometimes anarchic humour onstage never detracts from the power of Brecht’s play to skewer bourgeois greed and legal corruption. For young spectators, this is the ideal introduction to Brecht, not least in showing how a skilful director can blow the cobwebs off some tried and tested theatrical ideas and make them relevant to a 21st-century audience.