Review – On The Beach and Resilience, Contingency Plan, Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, 21st October 2022

Contingency PlanSteve Waters’ two interweaving plays, On The Beach and Resilience, together known as The Contingency Plan, first saw light of day back in 2009 at the Bush Theatre in London. If the urgency of measures to deal with climate change was a hot topic twelve years ago, they’re off the scale today. Waters has revised the plays to bring them bang up to date – or as up to date as our daily changing political landscape allows – in this brand new production for Sheffield Theatres, directed by Chelsea Walker (On The Beach) and Caroline Steinbeis (Resilience).

RobinWe saw both plays on one day – On The Beach first, then Resilience – with a very interesting and informative panel discussion between the plays in the Playhouse including members of the creative team and scientists from the British Antarctic Survey. This helped to give the plays context and added to the sense that, if we don’t do something about it now, it really is too late. From a dramatic point of view, I’d recommend that you should see both plays, as they tell the same story from two very different angles. SarikaI also think it makes more dramatic sense if you see Resilience first; both plays end with catastrophe, but the nature of that catastrophe probably has a greater impact if you follow the political activity leading to the personal tragedy, rather than the other way round. On The Beach concentrates on domestic life on the front line of coastal vulnerability, whereas Resilience dwells on the political shenanigans of the COBRA meetings to discuss the imminent dangers. Act One of Resilience takes place the day after Act One of On The Beach; Act Two of both plays takes place at exactly the same time, five months later. Both reach the same conclusion – the inescapability of the disaster to follow. As such, you could say the plays are pretty pessimistic.

Robin and SarikaNo doubt about it, it’s a curious mix, this double play. What it has unquestionably in its favour is that it’s hugely thought-provoking, and you may well be talking for days about it afterwards. It may, indeed, change your life, your priorities, and whatever steps you might take to help save the planet. One of the ways it does this is by offering you the problem in bite-size chunks. You may well not feel able to save the planet – that’s an unbelievably massive task. But you might feel you could do something to help save Norfolk. That’s where the majority of our attention is turned, as elderly eco-warriors Robin and Jenny live a simple, detached, unsophisticated life; growing their own food, brewing their own drinks, eschewing the trappings of modern life like mobile phones and the Internet.

JennyRobin is a retired Antarctic glaciologist who has built a model to show how rising sea levels could cause a watery incursion onto their saltmarsh property; their son Will has just returned from a stint at the British Antarctic Survey, horrified at the change to the environment that he has seen out there, and determined to work directly with the government to alert them of the imminent dangers. Robin is aghast that Will is chucking in the research to work in London – and we learn more about Robin and his past that clouds his judgment of the future. As for those politicians, to what extent are they convinced by the dangers that the scientists’ research presents them, or are they more concerned with playing the electorate and doing what they know will win them votes? And are even the advisers themselves fully committed to revealing the truth, or do they also hold back for fear of aggravating their political masters?

WillSo, a vitally important plot, and a positively thought-provoking piece of work. It’s a little disappointing, then, that there are some difficulties with the plays that hold them back from being a truly gripping dramatic experience. Act One of Resilience is, for example, very wordy. You feel that a lot could be cut or tightened up with the advisers’ dealings with Secretary of State for Resilience, Chris Casson. Some of the lines in both plays come across as rather clunky, and don’t have that recognisable sound of a genuine conversation. The water tank that dominates the stage in On The Beach becomes a burden to the play and staging once its initial use to house the model has been completed. ColinIs it a real tank or is it a symbol of the sea or the storm? If the latter, then why do Will and Sarika say they come from the beach further downstage? If the former, why do Robin and Jenny get inside the tank and splash around? There’s an inconsistency with the way it is incorporated into the action which I feel muddles the story.

ChrisGeorgia Lowe’s stark, bare, grey, platformy set suggests discomfort; otherwise, it does very little to enhance our appreciation of either location, bringing to mind neither coast nor office; it also makes it virtually impossible for any action to take place upstage. And there are some peculiar vocal inflexions from a couple of the actors: as when, for example, Geraldine Alexander’s Jenny’s line about the birds flying overhead, “must be five-hundred-odd birds”, is spoken as “five hundred odd birds” as if there were something very peculiar about them all.

That aside, the performances are good; there’s a crisp disconnect between Paul Ready’s Casson and Geraldine Alexander’s Tessa that makes for some very ugly but exciting tension; Peter Forbes is excellent in his dual roles Tessaas the troubled and brutal Robin and the unsophisticated but sincere Colin; Joe Bannister’s Will and Kiran Landa’s Sarika are full of the enthusiasm of youth with the drive to get their message home, even if that works against their own personal circumstances.

An important, but far from perfect, work given an exuberant, but far from perfect, production! Nevertheless, I’d absolutely recommend it if your climate change complacency needs a kick up the backside – this will certainly provide that.

Production photos by Marc Brenner

3-starsThree-sy Does It!

Review – In Praise of Love, Royal and Derngate, Northampton, April 7th 2011

In Praise of LoveI’m really pleased to see Terence Rattigan receiving deserved attention in his centenary year. If there’d not been any Rattigan, there wouldn’t have been any Osborne to rebel against him. I can imagine a late 1950s dramatists’ tug of war competition – Osborne, Wesker, Pinter, Beckett, Delaney pulling hard on one side with Coward and Rattigan on the other, looking for a bit of support from The Mousetrap and Salad Days. The outcome of the struggle was inevitable.

But class will out, and it’s great to see his current reinstatement on our stages. When I was 16, I took myself down to London one evening to see a revival of “Separate Tables”. It had a fantastic cast, lead by John Mills and Jill Bennett; masterclasses in stiff-upper-lipness and emotional devastation respectively. The following year I saw the original production of “Cause Celebre”, with Glynis Johns and Kenneth Griffith. I remember the play being heavily criticised for “not being as good as the plays he wrote in the 1940s.” I felt that was unfair – it was a good story, well acted, lots of suspense; and I can look back now and feel that I was privileged to see an original Rattigan production.

Enough reminiscing. As part of their “Made in Northampton” season the Royal and Derngate now have a new production of “In Praise of Love”, one of Rattigan’s less well known plays originally produced in 1973. To outline the story is to spoil it for you, so I won’t. Suffice to say it involves a long marriage, sickness, secrecy and hidden motives.

The use of a black curtain slowly rising at the beginning of both acts and slowly descending at the end of the acts makes a surprising visual impact. You very slowly begin to take focus on the set (an amazing recreation of a book-lined flat by Naomi Dawson) and the couple living in it; slowly you appreciate the situation in which they find themselves; and at the end, slowly it dawns on you what the future will hold.

Geraldine Alexander At the centre of this play is Lydia, an Estonian refugee whose homeland no longer exists (remember this is 1973). Rootless, she clings on to her love for husband no matter what life (and he) subjects her to. He drives her to anger, to love, to impatience, to tolerance, and much more besides. She loves her son non-judgementally, but like any mother is willing to manipulate him well outside his comfort zone. And she loves their family friend – to what extent, I think that’s for you to decide. Geraldine Alexander plays Lydia with gutsy fragility. In the nicest possible way, she looks like someone who has had to put up with a lot in life, and her slow descent into drunkenness is spot on. At times girlishly sprightly, at times careworn and depressed, she accurately depicts all the aspects of the character. Mrs Chrisparkle and I are friends with a couple of Finnish ladies of a certain age, and Finnish and Estonian traits being pretty similar, I can tell you this is a very realistic interpretation of the highs and lows of a Baltic lady!

Jay Villiers Her husband Sebastian is a self-confessed “shit”, and his selfish cantankerousness is very credibly written and played; useless domestically, demanding socially, begrudging with praise and kindness. We all know the kind of bloke who takes his wife for granted and acts boorishly; some of us even may be him. Jay Villiers shows beyond all doubt that it is not a pretty sight. The character development in the second act is equally well done. It’s a very fine performance.

Sean Power Sean Power as the old family friend turns his hand deftly to supporting all three of the other characters in their hours of need, without ever giving you the sense that he is talking out of place or being disloyal to the others. His character is in a tricky situation and you completely believe in the “only way out” that he can live with.

Gethin Anthony Gethin Anthony as the son Joey is a calming influence on his feisty mother but a source of irritation to his father, with his different political views (quite a nice twist on the norm of the day where Rattigan’s traditional characters would have been old fashioned Tories disgusted by the leftist attitudes of the “younger generation” – here an old Marxist is disappointed by his son being liberal). Gethin Anthony’s younger behaviour revealingly contrasts him from the older characters. Here you see the polite young man who greets the family friend, the optimistic person at the start of a hopefully promising career, and also someone who looks forward to a better political future. He’s also not above a childish stomp upstairs in a huff when things go wrong – mind you, nor’s his father. It’s a very likeable performance, the easiest character in the play to identify with; combining the occasional insolence of youth with the anxiety of being out of one’s depth with the future.

However, despite all this, we do have a slight problem, Houston. The set is great; the acting is great. If you take any sequence of conversation within the play, it’s elegantly written and may well make you laugh, shock you, surprise you, sadden you. There is a clever coup de theatre in the story that turns the world on its head. But somehow, when you put it all together, it just comes across as being a bit underwhelming. Despite tackling important subjects and plumbing the depths of deep emotion, it all feels a bit small. A lot of the first act comes across as very “scene-setting” – Mrs Chrisparkle actually used the word “clunky”. The second act is written much more fluidly and the story progresses without interruption to its climax. But, as the curtain fell, I was expecting something more to happen. Does it end there? I can see why Rattigan chose that moment to close the scene, and the visual expressions of the two characters on stage at the end were very telling of their plight. But I still wanted one more thing to happen. One more twist; one more revelation. Rattigan, you let me down!

On our way home Mrs Chrisparkle said she couldn’t imagine a better production of this play. And if that is half-praise, I think that sums up my thoughts too. If you’re interested in Rattigan, you’ll want to see it out of a sense of completeness. You’ll also get to see some really good acting and a play that’s perfectly suited to its surroundings in the Royal.