Croft tries to farm too much drama to be a total success
THEATRE The Croft Perth Theatre ✪✪✪ Ten Times Table King’s, Edinburgh ✪✪✪
The scene is a remote cottage on Scotland’s northwest coast, converted from a former croft; and the time is the present, as gay couple Laura and Suzanne arrive to spend their first real time together, after months of clandestine meetings while Suzanne extricates herself from a 20-year marriage.
In Ali Milles’s debut touring drama The Croft, though, time is a shifting and unstable force; and as Laura, whose father owns the house, explains its history to suzanne, the audience also finds itself glimpsing moments from the past that have somehow left their mark on the place – both the trauma that marked the final days of elderly crofter’s widow Enid, back in the 1870’s, and the death there from cancer of Laura’s mother Ruth, 15 years ago.
In a sense, Milles’ drama is a play that simply tries to do too much. The Highland Clearances, the strict sexual mores of Victorian Scotland, the scapegoating of older woman in rural communities, the pain of Ruth’s marriage to a selfcentred vicar, Laura’s unreconciled grief over her mother’s death and the huge emotional tensions that threaten to rip Laura and Suzanne’s new relationship apart – all of these swirl furiously around the stage. There are also more than enough ghostly apparitions to propel the play firmly into the “supernatural thriller” category. Overall, it’s small wonder neither Milles nor director Philip Franks can give all of these elements the time they would need to develop convincingly, or to interact fully with each other.
Where the play scores highly, though, is in the deft and stylish quality of some of its dialogue, particularly in the contemporary scenes, and in the fine performances from its five-strong cast, led by Gwen Taylor as old Enid, and Lucy Doyle as her young proteges Laura and Eilene. It’s difficult, in the end, not to feel that Taylor’s impressive stage presence is under-used; her story suffers from scanty development and an over-melodramatic ending, and the play’s grasp of late 19th-century Scottish history and society often seems vague. Yet there’s plenty to enjoy in a multi-stranded tale of sexual rebellion and emotional torment down the ages; and some performances to relish, even if their purpose sometimes seems unclear.
It’s much easier to discern Alan Ayckbourn’s intention in his 1977 play Ten Times Table, premiered two years before Margaret Thatcher swept to power in 1979. The 1970s were the decade when the UK achieved its highest ever levels of post war economic equality and social mobility; so it’s perhaps not surprising that it was also a time of ferocious political division, with elements of the middle and upper classes becoming ever more convinced that red revolution and social collapse were just around the corner.
Ayckbourn seeks to capture this mood through the proceedings of a festival committee in a small English town, Pendon. Tensions mount when the chair, businessman Ray, suggests re-enacting the story of a 18th century workers’ uprising in the town; radical teacher Eric takes on the role of organising the workers, while Ray’s high-handed socialist-hating wife Helen undertakes to organise the military contingent who suppressed the rebellion, with such gusto that real violence begins to seem possible.
Ayckbourn’s play, in other words, contains elements of both sitcom realism and surreal political farce; and while Robin Herford’s touring production deals enjoyably with the first, it simply fails to find a tone, design or performance style that would cope with the more heightened mood of the play’s final scenes.
The result is a fierce sense of anti-climax at the play’s end, and a lingering question about whether the 1970’s England it conjures up is now just too long gone to mean much to us; but there’s still some fine acting to be relished from an impressively talented and experienced company, including Robert Daws as Roy, Deborah Grant as Helen and Elizabeth Power as the elderly Mrs Evans, who views proceedings with a wisdom and basic decency that the rest of the characters seem sadly unable to match.