Remember when The Young Ones hit the TV Screens back in the 1980s? Think that level of anarchic wild behaviour - unpredictable, violent, and farcically funny - turn it up a few notches, and you're getting near The Omission of the Family Coleman at Bath's Ustinov Studio theatre. Three generations - granny, mum, two sons and a long-suffering daughter - coexist in a cramped space, bouncing off each other in permanent fury yet somehow fused inextricably together. The glue is Granny, and when she's removed from the equation, nothing can ever be the same again. Outsiders enter their lives: another sister whose arrival is more unexpected than Godot's as she had long ago escaped into a more ordered world, and two men who in different ways will impact on this wayward bunch of interdependent misfits.
Claudio Tolcachir developed this 'theatrical phenomenon' in Argentina in 2005 but this new version by Stella Feehily is effectively transferred to a downtown area of Dublin: the ‘omission’ of the title is the capacity to exist in a community.
Directed by Laurence Boswell at an effectively high-impact pace, this production is fantastically well acted by the entire cast with Rowan Polonski utterly mesmeric as Marko the ‘wild child’ savant who, like Fiers in Ibsen's Cherry Orchard, becomes victim to a world changed utterly as the final verse of Yeats' The Cloths of Heaven sang slowly at the end of the play: Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. Tim Shortall's design of both set and costumes also contributed to an unforgettable piece of theatre - go if you can, it's on till 27 April. Images Simon Annand
Frome Drama Club has been looking at dysfunctional social mores too, with a double bill of Dennis Potter plays: Blue Remembered Hills and Brimstone and Treacle are playing at Merlin Theatre for three nights, and as always with this company there's huge commitment to excellence in set, costumes, and special effects as well as performance. Both of these one-act plays, as director John Palmer comments in his programme notes, have an uncanny resonance with our current political anguish. Set in 1943, the children in the first play would have been elderly in 2016, and possibly yearning for the England they remembered from idyllic nostalgia, where they roamed in the fields and woods of the Forest of Dean, the bombing raids and captured enemies merely part of their games like the dolls pram, scrumped apples and tree climbing. Yet nothing of this is remotely idyllic: even before the tragic ending, their voices are shrill with conflict copied from the adult world around them, they kill the wild life they find, bully the weakest, fight, cheat and lie. Charm was not required in the boys, but Simon Joyce's Raymond was endearing and Alan Burgess brought poignancy to lonely Donald, while Angela (Sue Ross) and Audrey (Suzy Howlett) effectively created the two little girls who with every utterance evoked that famous Ignatius Loyola premise that the child at seven will show the adult for life.
I wish I could show you the clever set change that transformed the barn and fields to a 1970s suburban living room where the bickering Bates couple (Polly Lamb and Julian Thomas) tend their brain damaged daughter Pattie- a brilliant performance by Georgina Littlewood - and succumb to the wiles of a charming stranger who happens to be the devil. Django Lewis-Clark (I'm using this portrait of him by Chris Bailey as I can't find any production pictures) brought dapper elegance to this strange role, providing a real highlight with his wickedly parodic prayer to the Lord in the guise of every extremist cleric around the planet. Martin-the-devil has high hopes of Mr Bates who laments that the whole country is full of blacks and addicts and 'Everybody is up to something' - but ultimately won't be lured to accept pure evil and admits 'All I want is the England I used to know - the England I remember as a young man. I simply want the world to stop, and go back a bit.' Written in 1976, how sadly prescient. Let's hope UK like Pattie will suddenly arise with renewed clarity and belated understanding.
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