Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✩✩
by Dennis Potter, directed by Nicole Wilson
Good Old Neon, Artscape Youngspace, 180 Shaw St., Toronto
February 13-24, 2017
John: “That’s right we didn’t see nothing”
Good Old Neon is giving Toronto a rare chance to see Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills on stage. Potter, best known as the writer of such landmark television series as Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986), wrote Blue Remembered Hills as a BBC Play for Today that was broadcast in January 1979. After the scripts’s publication in 1984, theatre companies have been staging the screenplay as a play. Although Good Old Neon does not fully capture the odd nature of the play, the production is filled with a number of fine performances.
The original screenplay concerns a group of seven seven-year-olds playing on a summer afternoon in 1943 in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. Since World War II was still ranging both in Europe and in the Pacific, the boys naturally play war-related games while the two girls play house. Innocent play with an undertone of malice continues until an air raid siren frightens them all. This sudden fear leads the group to turn on the most troubled among them with tragic consequences.
The director of Good Old Neon’s production is Nicole Wilson who in 2015 played Pattie in Brimstone and Treacle, a Potter television play from 1976 adapted for the stage. Wilson’s concept for Hills is to take the play out of its original time and place and present it abstractly. The walls of Studio 107 are white. All seven actors wear white. They even have white greasepaint on their faces albeit in different configurations. Only the actor playing Donald, the character most unlike the rest, wears no makeup. In the text all references to Germans, Italians or Japanese in Potter are replaced with references to China.
Wilson prefaces the action by having the cast join one by one in singing the same song over and over. This completed, they then march about the acting space in a threatening manner. Wilson has the cast repeat this march just before the final scene. It may be that Wilson is attempting to show the power of conformism among children (or adults) and to reveal the brutality that lurks within them. The problem is that Potter doesn’t emphasize the children’s conformism. Instead, he’s keen to show how differently they react to the same situation, such as the air raid siren. Also, the tragedy that happens at the end of the play is not the result of concerted brutality. Instead, Potter shows that in reaction to one event the children show many types of guilt – guilt from actively participating, guilt from passively looking on, guilt from merely being where it happened.
Asking adults to play children is a difficult demand, yet it is essential to the play. For the play to succeed fully, the cast has to act with complete unanimity in acting style. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Some are excellent a conveying the effect Potter is after; some are not.
The one actor who best conveys the enthusiasm and awkwardness of a seven-year-old along with the yearning to be grown up is Jeff Dingle as Willie. After Wilson’s prologue the action begins with his zooming about the acting area pretending to shoot down enemy planes. All his reactions whether in joy or fear are a little bit larger than they would be before growing old wears off the novelty of living each day anew.
Also excellent as playing a child, though in a very different way, is Hayden Finkelshtain as Donald, the outcast of the group whom the children mock as “Donald Duck”. Donald’s father is a prisoner of war in Japan and Donald is left alone with a mother who physically abuses him. While the other children go to the forest to play, Donald goes there to escape his home. Finkelshtain convincingly presents Donald as a child with a damaged psyche, almost no self-esteem and full of fear. Finkelshtain plays Donald as if he is in his own mental cage that makes it hard for him to mix with the others or they with him.
Vince Deiulis makes a fine Raymond, who, though dressed as a cowboy, is generally more afraid than the others and is easily made fun of because of his stutter. Deiulis makes Raymond the most empathetic character after Donald. Like Dingle, Deiulis knows how to make the exaggerated emotions of a child seem perfectly natural, as when Raymond mourns the death of a squirrel the others have killed.
At the other end of the performance scale are Michael-David Blostein as Peter and Ara Glenn-Johanson as Angela. Peter is the bully of the group and the most inclined to violence while Angela is haughty and prim and rather proud that she has a baby doll and a pram. Blostein basically does nothing to change his voice or demeanour to suggest a child, making it often appear that he is a much older youth playing with children. Yet, Blostein is good at revealing that under his blustering façade, Peter is essentially a coward. Glenn-Johanson plays a young girl but seems to have aged back only to about eleven because she uses gestures and a tone of voice too ironic for a believable seven-year-old.
Alexander Offord as John and Nicola Atkinson as Audrey fall somewhere between these two extremes. Both are mostly quite successful at presenting their characters as children, though both occasionally lapse into behaviours more typical of teenagers. Offord shows that John is the most sensible of the group which only makes his change at the end more devastating. Atkinson shows that Audrey with her thick-glasses is fearful of becoming an object of fun and is desperate to find acceptance. For this reason Audrey tries to latch onto Peter, whom she regards as the strongest of the group.
What Wilson depicts best are the changing allegiances between characters and how friendship, even with those with dubious characters, is preferable to being shunned or mocked. The interactions of the children may seem random and inconsequential until the end, but Potter writes with an art that hides art. The children’s talk from the first is dominated by imagery of fire, and comes to the fore in a comical scene where Raymond and Willie try to make a fire by hitting stones together or rubbing sticks.
Violence lurks just beneath the surface of play so that play fighting can easily become real fighting. Here the foremost scene is John’s sound thrashing of the bully Peter, well choreographed by Nate Bitton. It is Peter’s defeat and the fear of the siren that the group experiences while Donald is safe in his barn, that give impetus to the horrifying conclusion, a conclusion that Wilson may have staged just too abstractly for everyone to know what is happening.
Even if the production does not fully succeed, it does demonstrate the power of Potter’s deceptively simple play. It is required reading in British schools and clearly should be better known on this side of the Atlantic. What the play reveals so ably and that Wilson, despite her prologue, seems to realize is that tragedies do not have to arise in the facile form of evil versus good, because they can arise simply when fear drives ordinary people so seek a scapegoat. It’s a play that merits close attention and we have to thank Good Old Neon for staging it.
The title come from poem XV in A.E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad (1887) about the loss of innocence:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Vince Deiulis, Jeff Dingle, Ara Glenn-Johanson, Alexander Offord and Nicola Atkinson; Michael-David Blostein and Jeff Dingle; Ara Glenn-Johanson, Hayden Finkelshtain and Nicola Atkinson. ©2017 BRH Media.
For tickets, visit http://goodoldneon.ca.
2017-02-14
Blue Remembered Hills