Open air season goes to town with Wilder

Our Town (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre) Verdict: An elemental pleasure ★★★★✩

IT MUST be summer because the covers are off at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre — your chance to mingle on the picnic lawn, drift along the bars selling strawberries and cream and £10 ‘Artisan G&Ts’, and get parped out of the gates afterwards by a trad jazz band.

Oh, and, in between, to watch a play about life’s terrifying transience and persistent underlying sadness, which starts gently enough with a folksy small-town breakfast scene and the milkman arriving in a jingle of bottles, yet ends in a graveyard where the dead regretfully lament their wasted existences. Another G&T, anyone?

Edward Albee considered Thornton Wilder’s Our Town from 1938 ‘one of the toughest, saddest, most brutal plays’ but had seen so many sappy productions of it that he wished Wilder had added a cautionary note for actors and directors: ‘ This is a tough play. stop sitting around pretending it’s a Christmas card.’

Ellen McDougall’s version doesn’t even pretend. Melancholy seems to haunt the ordinariness of this play about a play from the start and Rosie Elnile’s bleacher-backed stage opens bare, as Wilder stipulated, though Regent’s Park, on a blessedly clear evening, added the squawking of parakeets and the occasional light drift of goose-down from the nearby pond.

As the omniscient stage Manager, conjuring and explaining the workings of Grover’s Corners like a small-town Prospero, Laura Rogers smartly comes across as both warmly welcoming and coolly mysterious — attached and detached. Francesca henry and Arthur hughes are both excellent in the key roles of the teen lovers Emily and George, and there is sound back-up everywhere.

Perhaps the comedy in the play is underworked and the long, two-act first half begins to test the patience. But the struggle of these characters to occupy ‘this moment, now’ and to appreciate life before it passes gathers extra power in the setting of an actual gathering dusk.

Also this season in Regent’s Park: hansel & Gretel, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Evita. if any of those make as poignant a use of nightfall as this Our Town, they’ll be doing well.