The Stage

The Long Way Home

Published Friday 26 February 2010 at 11:45 by Hugh Homan

Designer Mika Handley’s archetypal Greek microcosm - a tilted, circular, flat disc, a couple of cypress trees, a few tiny houses, all in wonderful muted browns and umbers and ochres - provides the atmospheric stage on which Eastern Angles are touring Charles Way’s enigmatic play around East Anglia this spring. The sun rising behind the rear diorama will thrill and impress in venues far and wide as it did me, I am sure.

Jumaan Short and James Bolt in The Long Way Home at Arts Centre, Haverhill Photo: Mike Kwasniak

The two-act play revolves (no pun intended) around Old Mother. A widow, she wants to return to the seaside village of her youth. On The Long Way Home, she discovers a wild Dog-Boy and takes him with her. A male and a female Storyteller help her and us by playing all the other roles and manipulating the interesting puppets that telescope the story for our convenience.

Susan McGoun is Old Mother. She’s good, but the cavernous hall in Haverhill demanded more oomph. It is a solid but muted performance. Theo Devaney is suitably wild and unkempt as he emerges from under the leaves, learns to identify stone, stick, woman and boy and metamorphoses into an attractive young man under the old woman’s tutelage. James Bolt and Jumaan Short are excellent as the Storytellers. Slipping in and out of character, they comment on the action while retaining a firm grasp of the narrative. The dialogue touches on many aspects of human experience. I’m not sure that Dog-Boy’s anguished cry of ‘What is God?’ is or can be adequately answered on this interesting and entertaining journey, but you certainly leave the theatre musing on life’s mysteries.