Look Back: 50 Readings, 50 Writers, 50 Years ( Archived )

Reviews

Skyvers/ The Room/ The Dumb Waiter4 stars Michael Billington, The Guardian, 25 January 2006

The Royal Court’s series of 50 rehearsed readings of key plans from its past offers the best value in London. For as little as a fiver you get a different play each night, top-line casts and an extraordinary glimpse not only of theatrical history but of the fabric of British life.

Barry Reckford’s Skyvers, first seen in 1963, is a case in point. This is a devastating account by a young Jamaican writer of life in what now would be called a “bog-standard” London comprehensive. The kids themselves, about to leave school at 15 with minimal qualifications, are chippy, resentful and contemptuous of education. As they cruelly point out to a teacher, “Where did it get you?” And Cragge, the one boy who tries to escape the nihilist ethos by doing a bit of sports reporting, ends up rejected by his mates and implicated in hooliganism by the headmaster.

Other dramatists, such as Nigel Williams in Class Enemy, went on to explore the failure of the system to cope with those at the bottom of the heap. But Reckford got there first and, while it is tempting to say times have changed, new figures show that up to 16m adults today have the reading and writing skills of primary children. Pam Brigtons production, more a mini-staging than a reading, also vividly captures the mutinous surliness of kids for whom school is little more than a prison. OT Fagbenle as the isolated Cragge, Fraser Ayres as the charismatic gang-leader and William Hoyland as the patronising headmaster are first-rate in a piece that proves the best drama offers vital social evidence.

A Pinter double bill of The Room and The Dumb Waiter, well revived by Harry Burton, also proves more than a demonstration of technical skill. Everyone bangs on about Pinter’s mystery. But Rose, the immured heroine of The Room, perfectly embodies a particularly working-class xenophobic isolation. Beautifully played by Sian Thomas, forever shielding herself in her shawl, she embodies the truculent nervousness of little Britain in the late 1950s. Even The Dumb Waiter gains political resonance from the casting of two Irish actors, Stanley Townsend and Fintan McKeown, as the hit men waiting to carry out a contract killing. You are constantly reminded that, while perpetrators of violence, they themselves are victims of a murderous hierarchy. But what these readings confirm is that the Royal Court’s vast black catalogue is a form of living history.

The Entertainer4 stars Benedict Nightingale, The Times, 18 January 2006

Soon the Royal Court will be giving us David Hare’s Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, Christopher Hampton’s Total Eclipse, Caryl Churchill’s A Number, Jez Butterworth’s Mojo and Sarah Kane’s terrifying Blasted, as well as Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead _and Sam Shepard’s _Geography of a Horse Dreamer, both directed by their authors. But the rehearsed readings of 50 selected offerings from the theatres last half-century began this week with something other than the seemingly inevitable Look Back in Anger. It was slightly later played by John Osbourne, directed by Hare and starring Robert Lindsay as the down-at-heel comedian originally performed by Laurence Olivier, that got these one-night stands off to a terrific start.

Shorn of the elaborate designs_ The Entertainer_ had always seemed to require, reduced to actors perched with their scripts in the most puritanical chairs even the court could find, the play packed far more punch than I had expected. After all, it was first performed in 1957, when the nation was still reeling from the fiasco at Suez. Indeed, one of its characters has been demonstrating against such imperialist throwbacks in Trafalgar Square. So was the rehearsed reading simply a rueful salute to both our and the Court’s history?

Despite the plays loquaciousness, not at all. For one thing, Lindsay’s Archie Rice had the makings of a major performance. Actually, more than the makings, for it was already a dark, disturbing portrait of someone who had lost is self-belief and self-respect. Here was an Archie who could shrug and quip and tell dirty jokes and scornfully sing why should I care? but behind the empty laughter was a deeply angry, embittered man.

There was obviously room for Lindsay to develop his reading, but he was pretty close to mastering his lines, for his eyes were mostly off the script he was holding and, when song-and-dance was needed, his voice and his toes managed both unaided. But then the whole affair seemed marvellously fresh. It left me aware, as never before, that Osborne was writing about disintegration and decay on four levels: the man, his family, the musical hall and, symbolised by them all, the England seemed to belong to moribund politicians fighting hopeless colonial wars, like the one in Cyprus that kills Archie’s soldier son.

The performers also included Anna Maxwell-Martin and Tom Riley, Pam Ferris as Archies emotionally scattered wife and Sam Kelly as a father who, far from being the nice Edwardian leftover I’d assumed, came across interestingly as a cantankerous xenophobe, racist and homophobe custom built to cure any nostalgia for the 1950s. If you want to understand why Osborne despised his lower-middle class origins in Fulham – well, this all-too-authentic portrait of an unhappy quarrelsome, boozy family should help you.