Chris Eldon Lee reviews ‘Unearthed’, ‘The Gift’ and ‘Tranklements’ – the first three plays in The Hoard festival at the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
“Hello, I’m Theresa Heskins and I’m the Director of the New Vic.”
Those opening words to “Unearthed” elicited a spontaneous and very deserved round of applause for the woman who has taken this theatre to new heights. But it wasn’t Theresa at all. It was Bryonie Pritchard, playing her. And every character that followed her onto the stage was another genuine individual, portrayed by an actor.
I’m all for verbatim theatre. Taking the testimonies of real people, word for word, and compiling them into a play is an excellent way of getting to the heart of the matter. So “Unearthed” is the nearest things to a living, breathing television documentary, telling, with the aid of some stunning pictures, the story of the finding of the Staffordshire Hoard – which was, apparently, the easy bit – and what happened next – which turned out to be the tricky bit. And once Theresa steps away, we the audience fill her shoes…hearing what she heard, as she researched the story.
In a field we meet a bevy of metal detector enthusiasts led by David Nellist (pictured) who plays Terry Herbert, the Staffordshire man who had the piece of luck in the first place; drawn to the site, we learn, by ‘visions’. The gold he dug up looked like brass scrap at first… but it just kept coming in inordinate quantities.
There was near panic amongst the academics when he told them what he had in his Tupperware box. The building of the M6 Toll nearby had been an archaeological blank…now they had to cope with an astronomical find. Appropriately for a Saxon hoard, a cloak and dagger hush-hush operation ensued. They invented a decoy murder investigation to put off the press and the “night hawks”(other less scrupulous diggers). It was all rather comical with secret meetings in pub car parks before dawn and coded e-mails. Already the riches were becoming a burden. Who is going to write the receipt for £3.285 million pounds worth of gold?
Fabulous characters emerge. David Nellist’s ‘Terry’ is a literally down- to-earth portrayal of a gentle farmer, bemused by the enormity of it all. Short and squat, with detector in hand, he sort of stumbles after the experts as might you or I. But he’s never overawed; and the million quid will come in handy.
Elizabeth Elvin’s portrayal of the Stoke Museum’s Cathy Shingler is a treasure in itself. Full of life and twice as bubbly, she’ a woman utterly enthused, conjecturing like I’ve never seen an academic conjecture before. But then she has to; because the message, loud and clear, is that no one knows nothing. We have no date. We have no ownership. So faintest ideas are called for. “It can be anything you want it to be and I’m rather hoping it dates back to King Penda, the super power of the day. It might even be a ransom!” How exciting! She claps her hands and leaves the ground.
Equally entertaining is Adam Morris who gets a laugh just telling us he’s playing the TV historian Michael Wood. So you’d expect him to be hyper-thrilled as he talks us through some of the finds. And they are the real stars of the show, projected animatedly onto the floor of the circular stage. Only in their glowing magnification can one fully appreciate the beautiful intricacy of the workmanship. A craftsman today, we are informed, would use a four times magnifying glass to do this.
My one niggle ( again! ) is the inclusion of hesitations and broken and overlaid speech in the verbatim script. I guess it’s to remind us of the authenticity of the dialogue, but it can hinder comprehension of complex affairs.
At the end, ‘Theresa’ is still recording ‘Terry’. “How are you going to end your play?” he asks. “I think it will be a bit of a cliff hanger”, she replies. And it certainly is.
One of the theories about why the gold was amassed and then buried is dealt with in Jemma Kennedy’s “The Gift”, which follows the interval. Now we are back in Saxon times, in the midst of a Mercian tribe at a time when Christianity is creeping in.
Gathered round a very convincing camp fire, the community is commenting on how their King is a changed man; his head turned by the Holy Trinity. There is incredulous laughter at the very idea of a virgin birth. “Mother Mary sounds like a wet weekend in East Anglia.” The men pragmatically conclude that “The Three Gods cannot be stopped”, but the women are not so sure. We learned before the interval that women had equal authority in Saxon society. Here, they view the gold as a bribe to build a Christian shine for Saint Chad at Lichfield; a scheme which must be thwarted.
It’s a rather convoluted construct and the storylines that emerge don’t exactly sing to a modern audience. We have so little Saxon context in our collective conscience – they were the Dark Ages after all – so it’s difficult to relate to their motivation. Why are the women so blood thirsty? Why do they turn so readily on their familiars? How would a gay musician really be viewed by his clan? Like the Hoard itself, there are lots of unanswered questions…which left me, for one, feeling unsatisfied. And for a play about gold, it all felt rather leaden.
Both the main house plays are driven (and occasionally overwhelmed) by the research …which the studio play is certainly not. Terry tenuously pops up here too, to give Lichfield lass Caroline Horton a fragment of the gold, which is woven into a remarkably free-thinking fantasy about Midland heroes and homing instincts.
“Tranklements” is Caroline’s one-woman exploration of (I presume) her own roots in Working Club entertainment. The show sparkles with little treasures. Playing herself aged 8 and three quarters, she opens her craft box to charmingly create a complete history of the Midlands in four minutes – with dolls. 25 years later she’s a sleazy singer in a bar. Robyn Hood (spelt with a Y) plays her piano and, in an excruciatingly ponderous stand up routine, Caroline destroys jokes about Coventry and Spaghetti Junction. In between she consorts with the Midland’s famous few from Offa to Ozzy Osbourne. King Offa, for example, is dismayed to learn that if he invades London he can’t take his sword on the Tube.
Caroline is a gilt-edged performer and there are many unexpected, shiny delights in this show (which outweigh the occasional lump of Fool’s Gold). It’s a show to pick your way through and saviour the moments that speak to you personally. The flight of homing pigeons as she returns to square one struck me as a lovely analogy. Enjoy!
Photo Andrew Billington
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