Royal Exchange, Manchester
23rd September, 2017
The Royal Exchange foyer is a vast
hall, a light and spacious public space with welcoming seating and bars, a
shop, exhibitions, free WiFi, and imposing and impressive marble columns, glass
dome and original trading board which points to its former existence as a
cotton exchange. In the centre of the Great Central Hall is the in the round
auditorium, a glass and steel chamber both intimate and immense, like
Shakespeare’s Globe. Visiting it for the first time this Saturday, I feel it’s
what the designers of Leicester’s Curve might have had in mind: a sort of
inside-out theatre where audience members and actors are in the same flow,
sharing the front of house space, being able to easily walk past the dressing
rooms and offices, and peer into the auditorium through the doors or on a
little black and white monitor, eavesdropping on the company’s vocal warm up.
And really strikingly, an exhibition on the mezzanine features artwork
depicting audience’s views of what theatre should be, including shunning
theatre’s sense of self-importance. The Royal Exchange pitches itself as
diplomatic, a place for everyone to enjoy and participate in theatre without
its reverence.
I mention this as Sarah Frankcom’s
production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town
(1938), and the play itself which seems to lend itself more easily to this type of production, beautifully
encompasses the feel and ethos of the Royal Exchange, giving the middle finger
to Gay McAuley’s taxonomy and resulting in one of my favourite uses of theatrical
space I’ve seen. The different areas of stage space, audience space, front of
house, and backstage are still there but the boundaries between them are
blurred – in theatre and production alike. At first, you’d be forgiven for
thinking Fly Davis hasn’t done much with the design. The sort of tables and
chairs you’d see in a school or town hall are spread about the otherwise bare
stage where actors and onstage audience members sit and chat together, whilst
some other actors blend into the audience responding to the Stage Managers’
request for questions. Frankcom’s production exemplifies theatre as a
collective act of community. She peoples her stage with a sense of community,
from spectators and performers (many of whom are regulars at the Royal
Exchange), to a choir, youth theatre members and the theatre’s own company of
elders. At times, we see actors running out of the space into the café dispersing
in between the tables as if fleeing through the town. Large lighting banks around
the auditorium shine the warm light of the New Hampshire morning sun into the
auditorium and casts shadows of actors circling the space onto the frosted
walls.
The ‘Stage Manager’ (played with
warmth and unassuming superiority by Youssef Kerkour) walks onto the stage and
addresses the audience, placing us at once in Manchester in 2017 and in a New
Hampshire town at the start of the twentieth century. It’s an American play,
we’re well aware, but he is the only American voice on stage, giving him an
authenticity and proximity to the play as we know it and a distance from the
multitude of local voices in this production. The wealth of British, often
Mancunian accents is appropriately jarring, and the old colloquialisms sounded
particularly alien in modern mouths – ‘I declare’ being a favourite, I can’t
help but think of the words spoken in a seductive voice in the manner of one of
Tennessee Williams’ Southern Belles! Yet such anachronisms make the play work
by highlighting Wilder’s dialogue, making us sit up and listen to what the
characters are saying, as opposed to letting the words wash over us in favour
of wallowing in what could be the sepia-tinged nostalgia of the setting (a
criticism levelled to many misunderstood productions of the play).
Over the three acts – each
respectively focusing on birth, love and marriage, and death – we see big
questions about the nature of life pondered amongst the minutiae of the daily
routine; heady ideas about our place in the country, the universe and the
bigger picture of everything that’s ever been and ever will be juxtaposed against
the tawdry rhythms and humdrum setting of Small Town, USA (cue Tim Minchin
lyrics!). After starting with a wide introductory ‘setting of the scene’, the
lens is then focused on neighbours and high school friends Emily (Norah Lopez
Holden) and George (Patrick Elue). Although we only see snapshots of the
embryonic stage of their relationship, these scenes are written and performed
with such care that we connect with them despite their brevity, from being
privy to their windowsill conversations across the street to witnessing a
private conversation in a diner. There’s a moment when Kerkour mimes an
intricate preparation of two ice cream sodas in this latter scene that is so well-observed,
from popping in the straws to licking a bit of cream off his thumb, that he
paints the rest of the scene very vividly. It is a moment indicative of the
spatial brilliance of Frankcom’s direction that we are at once in a theatre in
Manchester in 2017 and in New Hampshire, early 1900s. And if that all sounds a
bit Little House on the Prairie, the
scenes leading up to the wedding include a surprising and brutal amount of
honesty. Wilder’s sharp insight into human imperfections, fears and the
admission of flaws I found strangely moving.
It is the third act, however, that
feels most potent. The notion of death is sincerely performed by the actors
walking barefoot through the space. We see Emily’s funeral, her reluctance to
want to leave the mortal world and her attempt to relive her memories. With a
bit of design seemingly inspired from Bunny Christie’s People, Places and Things design, along with the rose-tinted,
beautiful lighting from Jack Knowles and moving sound by Ben & Max Ringham,
a pretty birthday scene from Emily’s youth is evoked. We effectively see her
realisation that we live ignorant of how precious life is. Seeing this
surrounded by the fast moving, urban landscape of Manchester, makes this moral
seem a bit obvious, or twee, and there is also a sense that the concept of
Brechtian ‘epic theatre’ which Wilder exemplifies offers a queasy blend of
superiority and inverted snobbery that comes with the sort of didactic motives
behind the techniques. In a city that has recently had its (un)fair share of
tragedy I’m sure none of its citizens need reminding of how precious life is.
Perhaps because of this context, the play comes across as a little naïve in its
moralising. It seems that it could have been written by someone when drunk. I
don’t mean that in a bitchy way, more that it is reminiscent of those big,
philosophising and sometimes maudlin conversations we have and concepts we
think through after a drink. Or in moments of tragedy.
In the programme, several
playwrights have written a bit on why it’s one of their favourite plays. Their
short few paragraphs probably articulate what’s distinctive and powerful about
the play more than my review can. I suppose it’s considered a masterpiece for
its mix of scale and the mundane, its hope, and its evocation of the here and
now (the universal) in its depiction of distinctly someplace else. For the
playwrights in the programme, Our Town
seems to be a piece to which they keep returning. Perhaps I too need to revisit
the play to be more enamoured by it. And if not the play, the Royal Exchange is
a space that I certainly will want to return to again and again.
Our Town plays at
the Royal Exchange Theatre until 14th October, 2017.
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| Patrick Elue and Norah Lopez Holden in Our Town. Credit: Stephen King |
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