Chris Eldon Lee review the National Theatre’s touring production of “People”, which is at Birmingham Rep until Saturday 21st of September 2013.
The older Alan Bennett gets the grumpier he becomes and the grumpier he becomes the funnier he gets.
The National Treasure has teamed up with the National Theatre and turned his grumpy guns on the National Trust – which he seems to regard as something of a necessary evil. He’s spotted that if you place the National Trust’s litany in a comic situation, their whole ethos is surprisingly amusing.
This is a wandering play – the arguments are circular rather than linear – and the audience has to do some digging to get to the heart of his thinking. But I reckon it revolves around the problem of managing deterioration – which is rather pertinent for a declining country with an ageing population.
When either a person or a House gets too geriatric for their own good, you send in the carers. Nobody likes having to do it, but the alternative is far worse. The trouble is, those prepared to take on the responsibility have established ways of doing things. In the case of the National Trust, they finance the care package by traipsing in truckloads of tourists – and we all know how too many ‘people’ spoil things.
And with the spoils of War Horse now at their disposal, the National Theatre can afford to tour a set of a stately home ripe for restoration and a squadron of extras to execute its stunning transformation.
The play starts with a ‘bang’. Maybe someone told dear Alan his plays aren’t racy enough. So there’s an orgasm in the first thirty seconds. Later he collides the National Trust and the Church of England with a shady pornographic film production unit and sits back to enjoy the fireworks.
The brightest shooting star is Sian Phillips who gives the performance of her lifetime – all eighty years of it – as the former fashion model Dorothy. She’s dainty on her feet, as graceful as ever and as stately as the family home she’s trying to cling on to. Using Bennett’s bullets, she rails against the impersonalisation of modern life, slack English and the worst thing in the world – other people – with extraordinary power. It’s a female King Lear – with laughs. And when she (and the House) have their glory once again, she looks fabulous in her Harper’s and Queen frocks.
Selina Cadell has chosen to stay on for the tour as the flustering Archdeacon of Huddersfield, who’s tasked herself with trying to arrest the decay of not only her sister but also the Church of England. With shaking head and windmill arms she’s like a pocket battleship without orders, hitting the bottle at the hopelessness of it all. Bennett uses her for wicked sideswipes at that establishment too. “The Church is supposed to love people, yes, but it doesn’t have to actually like them”.
The play at times was reminiscent of Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” – 100 years on with the sharks circling the ancestral estate having their oily plans disrupted by “hooligans in the Middle East”.
The creators of this philosophical farce are now old enough to do what they damn well like. Who cares if the pace falters now and again and not all the gags get recognised…you are left breathlessly admiring the energy and experience of exquisite theatrical masters still hard at work; refusing to decline into old age, despite the relentless march of the carpet slippers of doom.
Visit www.birmingham-rep.co.uk for information about Birmingham Rep.
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