Thought-provoking sketches of life’s pleasure and pain
Our Town
Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park ★★★★★
Awild profusion of Midsummer Night’s Dreams is about to burst forth across London, with Shakespeare’s fairy-filled romantic comedy taking up residence not only in its ideal bower, the Open Air Theatre, but at the Globe and Bridge theatres too. Ahead of that, though, the summer season at Regent’s Park gets off to an intriguing, counterintuitive start with a 20th-century American classic that, in its own way, is filled with a strange sense of the supernatural.
Thornton Wilder’s much-revived play of 1938 (in fact, relatively recently seen at the Almeida) fondly evokes innocuous (even Edenic) communal life in a fictional New Hampshire small town in the early 20th century, sketching the pleasure and pain of growing up, falling in love, marriage and death – folk getting by, folk passing on.
Where it goes the extra theatrical mile is in its third act, in which the spirits of the departed converse in the town graveyard – and a young woman who has died in childbirth tries to reconnect with the material world only to find that the intangibility of existence as it is lived moment by hectic moment makes it woefully frustrating beside the lofty (if lonely) viewpoint of eternity.
The whole thing could wing from
rose-tinted whimsy into the realm of pious piffle, but Wilder kept the conversational tone wry and grounded, and eschewed high-level artifice. “No curtain, no scenery” ran his opening stage directions.
In Ellen Mcdougall’s breezy, unforced revival, the cast largely wear modern gear and mime basic actions. Laura Rogers’s Stage Manager (calm, controlled, amused in line with the quirky tone) sets the scene, harnessing our collective imagination as she introduces these every-people. Designer Rosie Elnile casts a sly spell with the set, replicating the theatre’s auditorium itself. This mirror image creates an abstracted sense of collapsing time – we could almost be watching ourselves; and she embraces the simple alfresco magic of the space – a tree pokes through a seat – emphasising the dominant theme of nature at mysterious work. The air fills with hymns, the evening darkens, and I swear, to whatever lies above, that at an ethereal high-point the trees shivered in eerie synchronicity.
It’s not a big “showy” night out, and the acting is all the better for being straightforward and unaffected. Francesca Henry and Arthur Hughes are touching as the local newspaper proprietor’s daughter and the doctor’s son who become wholesome sweethearts, while Peter Hobday makes his mark as the sorrowful and reeling town drunk. The accents are – praise be – American, in contrast to counterproductive endeavours to make the dialogue sound local to us.
Carpe diem is the time-honoured message – and I’d concur; grab this while you can. It won’t change your life, but it may make you think about it.