July 26, 2009
An evening with Timothy West, Prunella Scales and their son Samuel West. How could it go wrong? Well it's hard to imagine, short of them not turning up - and turn up they did. Timothy has only just finished a long run of Rattigan's "The Winslow Boy", while Prunella ("Carrie's War" in the West End) and Sam ("Enron" in Chichester) are both in the middle of runs, so to give up their Sunday night for free was an act of real generosity.
The evening was part of the Oxford Playhouse 70th Anniversary celebrations, though it's not just a celebration of an amazing seventy years. (Just how amazing is underlined by the souvenir programme, within its array of photographs.) It is also a fundraising campaign to raise £1 million for the Oxford Playhouse as it commits itself to more home-grown productions and to making itself a theatre for all - and a “centre for artistic excellence, exploration and risk-taking”.
The family trio gave the packed audience an absolute treat of an evening. The staging, inevitably for such an evening, was minimal, consisting of five chairs discreetly accompanied by plastic bottles of water, and three actors in search of "family" themes. They then gave us a series of theatrical delights. What better place to start than Lady Bracknell interrogating her would-be son-in-law in Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest"; she discovers he had been found abandoned in a hand bag and concludes witheringly that she does not wish her daughter "to marry into a cloakroom and form an alliance with a parcel"! Scenes from "Brideshead Revisited", "Hamlet", and Pinter's "The Birthday Party" followed, and then Caryl Churchill's "A Number", a play about human cloning that that I immediately want to go and see in its entirety. Timothy and Prunella played to the hilt a scene from J B Priestley's "When we are married" about three couples who discover after 25 years that they weren't legally married. When he asks the dangerous question "What's wrong with me?", Prunella's delivery of the one word reply "Well" is devastating and hilarious.
The evening ended with a complete play, written for the radio play by Pinter. "Family Voices", which Sam introduced as a tribute to Harold Pinter and which he recalled performing 24 years earlier in the Burton Taylor Theatre, takes the form of a series of letters written by mother and son, with the unexpected voice of the dead father/husband near the end. Fascinating and dense as all Pinter's work is, it provided an appropriate counterpoint to the Oscar Wilde beginning, underlining the rich variety of our theatrical tradition.
But, for me at least, what the evening demonstrated above all is that three skilled actors, even working from written scripts with little time to prepare, can create a reality that grabs the unwary watcher by the lapels and drags him or her deep inside itself. And that, surely, is what good theatre is all about!
The evening was part of the Oxford Playhouse 70th Anniversary celebrations, though it's not just a celebration of an amazing seventy years. (Just how amazing is underlined by the souvenir programme, within its array of photographs.) It is also a fundraising campaign to raise £1 million for the Oxford Playhouse as it commits itself to more home-grown productions and to making itself a theatre for all - and a “centre for artistic excellence, exploration and risk-taking”.
The family trio gave the packed audience an absolute treat of an evening. The staging, inevitably for such an evening, was minimal, consisting of five chairs discreetly accompanied by plastic bottles of water, and three actors in search of "family" themes. They then gave us a series of theatrical delights. What better place to start than Lady Bracknell interrogating her would-be son-in-law in Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest"; she discovers he had been found abandoned in a hand bag and concludes witheringly that she does not wish her daughter "to marry into a cloakroom and form an alliance with a parcel"! Scenes from "Brideshead Revisited", "Hamlet", and Pinter's "The Birthday Party" followed, and then Caryl Churchill's "A Number", a play about human cloning that that I immediately want to go and see in its entirety. Timothy and Prunella played to the hilt a scene from J B Priestley's "When we are married" about three couples who discover after 25 years that they weren't legally married. When he asks the dangerous question "What's wrong with me?", Prunella's delivery of the one word reply "Well" is devastating and hilarious.
The evening ended with a complete play, written for the radio play by Pinter. "Family Voices", which Sam introduced as a tribute to Harold Pinter and which he recalled performing 24 years earlier in the Burton Taylor Theatre, takes the form of a series of letters written by mother and son, with the unexpected voice of the dead father/husband near the end. Fascinating and dense as all Pinter's work is, it provided an appropriate counterpoint to the Oscar Wilde beginning, underlining the rich variety of our theatrical tradition.
But, for me at least, what the evening demonstrated above all is that three skilled actors, even working from written scripts with little time to prepare, can create a reality that grabs the unwary watcher by the lapels and drags him or her deep inside itself. And that, surely, is what good theatre is all about!