Audio play is a first-class return
Celebrated Scottish playwright, artist and theatre designer, John Byrne, has returned after a gap of 13 years with ‘Tennis Elbow’.
And who better to produce it as an audio production than a combination of Pitlochry Festival Theatre artistic director Elizabeth Newman and David Greig, the artistic director at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh.
Last year, this team successfully presented Greig’s play ‘Adventures With The Painted People’.
Adapted for the radio, this was originally part of the Festival Theatre’s 2020 summer season but the closing of all live performances due to the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in its premier being performed on BBC Radio 3 as part of Culture in Quarantine.
All being well, this play will form part of the 2021 summer season and is due to be performed from June 10 until July 4.
In 1977 at the Edinburgh Fringe, Byrne’s debut play ‘Writer’s Cramp’ was a resounding hit, with the story centring around the life of Francis Senaca McDade, a writer and painter of dubious talent.
The hero or heroine of ‘Tennis Elbow’ is Francis’s estranged bisexual wife, Pamela Crichton Capers, whose life is portrayed in flashbacks through letters, telegrams, newspaper reports and her own recollections.
In conjunction with Sound Stage, this is a virtual theatre experience with a series of connected sketches which requires the concentration of the listener to follow the many colourful characters who appear in Pamela’s life.
These focus on everything from convent school in the 1930s, to Oxford University – where she discovers her sexual identity – to being a stretcher-bearer during the Second World War and imprisonment in Holloway Prison.
Discovering she is the illegitimate daughter of a German – her mother always said her one night fling was with a man who claimed to come from Belfast – she struggles to become a writer and painter and financial remuneration is always a desperate advancement through to her eventual denouement.
The dialogue is fast-paced, colourful, descriptive, raw and rich in comic detail, with alliteration and rhyming couplets to the extent the listener is absorbed into the flow of the speech patterns.
Listening to it a second time would possibly reveal to the listener some more of the language, while a visual presentation allows the audience to connect with the various characters.
As the play centres around a struggling artist, the significance of a short burst of song in the production, ‘Starry Starry Night’ by Don McLean – where Vincent Van Gogh is struggling with mental problems – is poignant, especially his quotation: “We spend our whole lives in unconscious exercise of the art of expressing our thoughts with the help of words.”
A cast of 10 performs this play, with approximately half of them playing more than one part.
All are to be congratulated for achieving the remarkable pace of Byrne’s script and the wonderful rhythm and speech patterns of the characters.
Perhaps special mention should be given to Kirsty Stuart as Pamela and Maureen Beattie as the Narrator.
Artistic director Newman, together with the cast members, heaped praise on sound recordist Louis Blatherwick, who worked tirelessly with all members of the cast to achieve the impossible as the actors had to construct their own recording studios in their homes.
Their efforts resulted in a first-class production.
For more details of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre summer programme, see the website at www.pitlochryfestivaltheatre. com