Winters’ tale is a dark delight
3 Winters (Royal National Theatre)
Verdict: Croatia brought to life
Hope (Royal Court)
Verdict: Bah humbug
OVER the past decade we have taken happy family holidays in Croatia but I have sometimes looked at men there — lopsided waiters, gnarled lorry drivers — and wondered ‘what happened to him during the war of independence?’
Croatia is still sore from history, not just from the 1991 war with Serbia but also from the Forties when some of its people collaborated with Germany. After escaping Yugoslavia, the country has now (crazily?) joined the European Union. As one character in Tena Stivicic’s impressive, wide-sweeping play puts it, Croatia is ‘a colony again’.
This story is all about one house in Zagreb and it is set in three periods: 1945, 1990 and 2011. One house — one country. The symbolism is not complicated.
While I may have looked at Croatian men and wondered about their past, playwright Stivicic takes more interest in the women. Little Masha is born in 1945 to a shrewd, pro-Tito mother who is given the keys to a grand villa where her mother was once a maid. By 1990 Masha’s mother has just died. By 2011 Masha’s prettier daughter is about to marry a capitalist property shark. Again, the symbolism is pretty blunt: is Croatia being raped or is she making the most of her chances? Howard Davies directs a beguiling narrative, beautifully staged. The plot may have a slow burn but I found it richly enjoyable and interesting.
Scene changes are done with exquisite skill, the eras changing with the slow swoosh of a screen. Period film projections are slightly chastening — how dated some of the Nineties’ footage already looks.
We hear of men fighting for their country. We see the perils of political break-up. Given Scottish separatism, this play has plenty to teach a British audience.
Some male characters are rather slightly drawn — you need to keep your wits about you to work out what is happening — but the ends are tied neatly in the last half hour.
Siobhan Finneran gives Masha the resilience of a woman who has survived by stoicism. Adrian Rawlins, as her husband, overcomes a surfeit of lines early on and achieves engaging quirkiness.
The veteran James Laurenson is touching as an old soldier and Sophie Rundle and Jodie McNee excel as modern-day sisters with different views of where Croatia should turn.
WHAT festive fare is the statefunded Royal Court theatre laying on this December? Why, they’re doing a new play about local council politics and the cruel Tory cuts. Oooh, that sounds nice. Don’t forget your Revels.
Hope (was ever a play less aptly named?) features Labour party members — one Scottish, one black, one posh, one Muslim, one Pakistani, one Liverpudlian, one vaguely Geordie — who refuse to agree a budget; whereupon beastly Whitehall imposes the cuts all the same on this workingclass town.
Biff. Take that, Tiny Tim!
THIS preachy show is, unintentionally, a hoot. And no, I don’t mean the joke about Communities Secretary Eric Pickles having ‘an a**e which is 6ft wide’.
My favourite passage was just before the interval where the Muslim councillor came over all messianic. After attacking ‘Cameron and his cronies’ he raised his voice to the heavens and said ‘ we’re the Labour Party. Together. United. We’ll never be defeated!’
Cue stirring music as our hearts swelled at the thought of socialist Paradise. Glorious! Did Jack Thorne, who wrote this play, perhaps pen Ed Miliband’s conference speech in Manchester?
Most of the action takes place in a church hall. The unidentified, Labour-run town must impose £22 million cuts.
The council chief, a bluestocking called Hilly (Stella Gonet), tries to impose cuts to the swimming pool, library, old folks’ care, etc. A day care centre manager, Gina (Christine Entwisle), starts an anti- closure campaign which attracts support on Twitter. Hilly and her deputy Mark ( Paul Higgins), who is Gina’s exhusband, have to do a U-turn.
The only time the story flickers above naive sermonising is when Hilly mentions she has been receiving aggro from Ed Miliband’s office. The writing is cliched, the characterisation sketchy, the plot so-so.
If a council had to choose between funding care for the disabled, or funding this sort of Fabian wet dream, there would not be much of a contest. Playwright Thorne can count himself lucky the system is so skewed to the London liberal elite.