Wednesday 26 February 2014

Silent Film

Just archiving here a short talk given this morning on the joys of silent movies.




Silent film

2 December 1895. A private room in a house on Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Two brothers, aptly named the Lumières, are showing a programme of short films to an audience of about thirty. The films are chiefly documentaries, scenes of everyday life such as a group of factory workers emerging into the sun at the end of their shift. The single fictional offering on this occasion is called L’Arrosseur arrossé, the hoser hosed. This, as it happens, is the first comic film in history. It consists of a gardener watering with a hose. A boy steals up behind him and stands on the hosepipe, cutting off the flow. The gardener inspects the nozzle, at which moment the boy releases his foot and the victim is drenched. The brief film ends with the gardener chasing the boy into the distance. Not a sophisticated plot. I wonder if the two participants knew they were the first ever film actors. At any rate, they disappeared into the bushes and away from the Lumiere’s camera into complete oblivion. It wasn’t until 1910 that anyone took any interest in actors’ names.



More exciting even than L’Arrosseur arrossé  was the documentary film, shown on the same iconic evening, with the resoundingly unexciting title of ‘The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station’. This piece shows, from a fixed point on the platform, the arrival of a steam locomotive at a provincial station and the subsequent disembarkation of the passengers. Could anything be less extraordinary? But because the camera is near the track, the train gets larger and larger as it approaches the foreground. It is said that the audience was alarmed that the train would actually crash through the screen, and that they ducked, screamed or ran for the door, no doubt with the thrilled howls of someone at the funfair. It’s easy to smile at their reaction today, but in my case it’s also a smile of envy. What a time this generation lived through: they were the first to see their living spaces transformed by the modern city with electric lighting; in 1910 they would hear an entirely new music, inflected by African rhythms, the sound of jazz; they would hear the first radios; they would see the first cars; in 1914, tragically, they would witness – or be destroyed by - a mechanized war that overthrew every notion and image of conflict in human history. Amid this blizzard of innovation, one can forgive them ducking an imaginary train. After all, until then, every image on a wall, whether a painting or a photograph – photography arrived in the late 1820s – represented space freed from time. And now, suddenly, through the illusion of images moving so fast they seemed to depict action, space shifted: there was time, there was motion, there was the motion picture. The factory workers must have seemed like ghosts, phantoms released from the stillness of the frame; the train a fantastic presence, somewhere between reality and representation. The thrilled onlookers were witnesses to a new art form, the art of cinema.


Or, to be precise, the silent cinema, the first period of film dating from roughly 1895 to about 1929, when the ‘talkies’, using a sound tape synchronized to the images, changed the form forever. I’ve long had an affection for early cinema, though it’s not an affection that everyone shares. To someone effectively governed by an iphone, a silent film is probably something as alien as a medieval painting, as altogether other as a monastic chant.  That is, in a curious way, a sign of their freshness. Given time, old things have a way of becoming new again; and we can renew ourselves by letting them into our lives, by forming an acquaintance with them. So in the next eight minutes or so, rather than talk about a particular film, I’d like to share with you my enthusiasm for silent cinema as a whole, and make the best case I can for giving it a go.


Three reasons, then, to watch a silent film. At the risk of sounding self-indulgently paradoxical, I’d give as the first the sound of them. I’m not talking about the beautiful whirr of the old projector reel, though, along with the crackle of a vinyl record and the clunk of a cassette deck, that has a treasured place in my aural memory. No, I refer to the fact that silent films were anything but silent. Even on that first evening in Paris, the films were accompanied by a piano, there to set the mood and underline the rhythm of the imagery. There are a few exponents of this jangly piano style today, with its set patterns for chases, romance, intrigue and slapstick. And you can hear plenty online, in the old films of silent comedians like Harold Lloyd and Fatty Arbuckle. Rather like the hosepipe gag, there’s somthing innocent and healthily basic about this music, inviting us into a world where the emotional contours are clear, a prelapsarian world before irony. Often, silent films were accompanied by orchestra. I’ve only experienced that once, at a showing in the Royal Festival Hall of Abel Gance’s 1927 epic, Napoleon. This film, which bankrupted the studio,  is so huge it is actually in some sequences projected simultaneously onto three screens, concluding with a huge panoramic shot of Napoelon’s entrance into Italy.  I had the good fortune to see it accompanied by a symphony orchestra playing the score specially composed by Carl Davis, and one felt that in the presence of such vast ambition and subject matter anything less wouldn’t  do.Intoxicated by the eyes and ears, one didn’t for a moment wish for a speech. I suppose rock concerts which combine music with large-scale digital projections are continuing a form first invented over a century ago. And the challenge of composing to a film continues to be taken up today: in 2004 the Pet Shop Boys performed live a score for the great Russian film Battleship Potemkin by Sergei  Eisenstein; and one of my favourite bands today, British Sea Power, have written wonderful music for Flaherty’s Man of Aran and for a documentary showing footage of Britain’s rivers, From the Sea to the Land Beyond. To take a small digression, film remains one of the best introductions to music I know of: I would challenge anyone who feels unattuned to modern classical music not to respond to Kubrick’s The Shining, which uses works by Bartok, Ligeti and Penderecki. Suddenly what sounds dissonant and shapeless makes perfect sense. There are large stretches of that film with no speech at all, and the combination of moving image and music takes us to a place deeper than words.


Though words, in those early days, there undoubtedly were. And that brings me to my second reason for giving silent film a go, and that is the sheer beautiful strangeness of it all.  How wonderful to learn from the memoirs of the Spanish director Bunuel that many early films had to be explained to an audience. We see someone looking offscreen followed by, say, a shot of a car crash. Simple: the person is looking at the car crash. But that skill of reading a new kind of narrative had to be learned. So the first viewers were guided through the first films by someone explaining how the pictures link up. An early film of a fireman entering a building and saving an inhabitant, then going in again, exists in two versions: one, a chronological account where we see the fireman go up a ladder and then see him inside the room; and another where we see all the outside scenes followd by the inside ones. It is thought that it was the second version that most people saw; they simply would not have connected the external and internal scenes as a logical sequence  in their minds. Actors would sometimes provide voices from behind the screen. In Japan a performer called a benshi would improvise voices and commentary to accompany a film.


And as they watched this new thing projected before them, viewers in West and East were also looking back to something older. For innovations often start by imitating the technology they are replacing. The first printed books, for example, imitated the appearance of manuscripts; early photographs stick closely to the composition and subject matter of paintings. Similarly, films imitated theatre: kabuki in the case of Japan, and in the West the world of popular spectacle that has now vanished. I suppose an early film of Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin takes us as close as we can ever get to the raucous, slapstick world of vaudeville and music hall. This was the world film hung onto for a bit: many early films are observed from a fixed point. There was some reluctance to use close-up as it was felt that the viewer, used to seeing a show from a stationery seat, would find the sudden change of perspective confusing. I love the melodramatic gestures and expressions of the first performers, though they learned very quickly that what was needed to get attention in the palladium was not appropriate for the big screen. Even by the 1920s, you can see subtle shifts of expression, tiny movements of the eyes, that suggest a character’s  inner world – the stock-in-trade of the film actor today. Have a close look at what Buster Keaton is doing with his supposedly expressionless face – it’s miraculous. An old world is moving through joyous experiment into a new one. Strange and beautiful.


My third reason for watching silent film must of course be to do with the images in front of you. Above all, what we see is movement. That is the natural matter of the art. Of course, the performing arts – theatre, ballet, opera – can all offer movement, particularly the moving body. But only film can convincinly show battles, bank heists, stagecoaches rushing through the desert, the whirrings of a gigantic machine. Or, for that matter, a train arriving at a station. And all of these were relished from the first moments. One very early film, George Melies’s Journey to the Moon, is a twelve-minute riot of movement, from an animated meeting to a journey to the moon, to an exciting chase across moon mountains to the return to earth. How did they do that in 1902? Go and watch it on YouTube and find out. And while you’re there, watch the first ever vampire film, Nosferatu, directed by F W Murnau with a mysterious producer called Albin Grau who subsequently disappeared into a world of clandestine occult societies. Few could be scared by this film today, but few could resist the lure of the expressionist imagery, from the rats crawling around a ship’s deck to the ruined castles of the Carpathians. It’s staright out of Arnold Boechlin and Caspar David Friedrich. One art learns from another.


Silent film did not, of course, really end in 1929. It’s been recreated lovingly, in The Artist (2011), while a film like The Turin Horse by Hungarian Bela Tarr, has barely any dialogue at all. The recent Robert Redford vehicle, All is Lost, is practically speechless and the recent Gravity has long beautiful stretches of pure imagery and music. And recent films are, very often, retreading stories and situations explored by the pioneers of a century ago. In Lang’s Metropolis, itself interestingly similar to H G Wells’s The Time Machine, we have the basic plot of the recent sci-fi pictures District 9 and Elysium. Change is underscored by continuity. Film-makers are, today and yesterday, working in what Maxim Gorky called ‘the kingdom of the shadows’, the ray of light that pierces a darkened room and takes us out of the shade and back again. Like children we stare up at the giants and heroes before us, from Napoleon to the Dark Knight, and we are at one with our ancestors around the flickering camp fire listening to tales of spirits and monsters. So that is my invitation today: attune yourself to a slower tempo, a different style of seeing things, and enter that wonderful wordless, monochromatic, unbearably lost world of the first cinema. Feel free to be irreverent, to laugh, but at the same time measure your own efforts at mastering something against theirs. Take a leave of absence from the noisy, digital, frenetic endlessly clicking present of the iphone, and enjoy a spell in the world of early film, in the kingdom of the shadows.

Monday 24 February 2014

Peter Grimes

The ENO have now joined the Met, Glyndebourne and ROH in providing live screenings of opera, and thus we were able to see the revival of David Alden's production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes with far better visibility and comfort than would have been enjoyed by most of the Coliseum audience. As is conventional these days, the production replaced Britten's Suffolk fishing village with a concept of its own: a Weimar aesthetic was employed to depict the community as a ferocious, semi-crazed mass, complete with a besuited Auntie, bug-eyed 'nieces' that had stepped out of a horror movie and apothecary Ned Keene as a writhing alcoholic loon. Parts seemed close to what an original might have been like: Act 2, Scene 1, set outside the church, was brilliantly effective in moving through its sequence of solos, ensembles and closing chorus, and one sensed the mighty ocean beyond. But the strange staging of the Moot Hall dance, depicting a cross-dressing community in a hedonistic frenzy, just seemed at odds with the libretto and score, and I found I had to 'see through' it to get what was going on (just a village dance, albeit with some predatory elements). Elsewhere, the use of boat motifs and angled planes of wood and corrugated iron effectively evoked the way the nautical world had colonised the mentality of coastal life. The presence of the sea is a constant in the music, even if the set quite often kept it out.


Whatever the visual interpretation, I found the work as a whole tremendously powerful. To my ears, the musical execution was first-rate, with the ENO Chorus providing a tremendous sound (and here the expressionist hand movement choreography, which reminded me of  Pina, helped to bring out the volatile emotions at work). Elza van der Heever (Ellen Orford) has a gorgeously lustrous voice, and Stuart Skelton in the title role was deeply affecting as actor and singer. The last Britten opera I saw was Billy Budd, and this work seems to chart similar psychological territory: the tension between the differently oriented individual and the ordered community, the demons that rise from the deep, the dangerous lure of innocence, sexual attraction, official power, individual quest for fulfilment, all drawn into a tragic arc leading to persecution and sacrifice. Shortly after his centenary, Britten is still delivering a powerful and strikingly contemporary message.

Saturday 22 February 2014

Pool (No Water)

Strong production (by Winchester company S J Theatre Productions) of Mark in-yer-face-Ravenhill's play at Winchester Discovery Centre last night. A young cast - 3rd-year students, I understand - set the bar high, and provided a 90-minute through-choreographed performance, full of Frantic Assembly-style lifts and synchronised expressive movement to electro-ambient music, all the while clearly delivering the text, and with live digital streaming thrown in for good measure. There was constantly inventive use of bare stage with white cubes and a hospital screen to suggest various locations. Director Ryan Grimshaw and his cast must have worked for countless hours on this. Unless you've had a go at it, it's impossible to realize just how hard it is to do this stuff. It's tremendous to have such inventive and innovative wok going on locally.


While I admired the massively ambitious and inventive performance, I was less convinced by the play itself. The story seemed an oddly trivial one, and depended on us being fascinated by a world of drugs, celebrity and the talentless end of modern art, which I'm not. The Big Message - there are great people and little people - seemed a weak pay-off for all the frenetic activity building up to it. And as with some works by Sarah Kane, Dennis Kelly et al, if all those involved seem utterly appalling  it's hard to get involved with them. A problem increased here by the use of a chorus who are never defined into recognisable individuals. This short chapter in theatre history is coming to seem dated, like the YBA Sensation movement with which it seems to be loosely associated. And  - my final grumble - the piece seemed to have just one rhythm. However inventive the staging and skilled the delivery this kind of relentless high-octane experience is bound to run into the problem of diminishing returns: the tenth lift and shock poetic image is just bound to be less effective than the first.


All of which is up for debate and might simply be middle-aged grousing. Pool (No Water) is guaranteed a long life in drama courses as it ticks all the boxes and genuinely offers companies the chance to think creatively. And for the audience, it's good to have one's preconceptions of what a play can or should be challenged. Looking forward to more from SJ Theatre, and from the talented company: Ryan Grimshaw, Mark Flynn, Ruth Sanders, Ed Pontone, Becky Radcliffe and Michaela Bennison - all names to watch.

Thursday 20 February 2014

A Number

Nuffield Theatre, February 2014. This was my third exposure to Caryl Churchill's A Number (one: radio version with Daniel Craig and Michael Gambon; two: BBC TV with Rhys Ifans and Tom Wilkinson), and seeing the same work three times, each in a different medium, seems appropriately in tune with a work exploring issues of identity and variety within replication. On stage the theatrical conceit is brought out most fully: one actor doubling different roles becomes not just a practical device but the very essence of the piece. How many of us (me) are there? Is anyone who they seem to be? This production cast real-life father and son John and Lex Shrapnel, who found a convincing rhythm for Churchill's realistic yet highly stylized script: sentences tail off, yet the characters never interrupt each other. Sometimes the most naturalistic speech is also the most heightened.



When we say a play 'explores' a theme, it doesn't generally mean it distils some clear philosophical thesis, or adds to our scientific knowledge of a subject. Certainly A Number does neither of these. A play explores the dramatic potential of a scenario, in this case the nightmare of a not-quite-possible-yet world where a man clones a disturbed child and finds the DNA has been further replicated by a scientist. Separately he meets three 'sons', the first mild-mannered, the second (also, I think, the original) apparently psychotic, the third a sort of saint / holy fool who finds the whole business exciting and points out we're all 99% genetically the same anyway. In earlier versions my sympathies had been more with the father (silly chump), but this time darker questions suggested themselves: why did the mother kill herself, exactly? The running thread of claiming compensation seemed more and more a desperate projection of self-recrimination. For all its modernity, the play also belongs in a tradition of the inheritance of guilt, reaching back through Ibsen's Ghosts to the House of Atreus.



If a real-life father-son team wasn't enough of a USP, the Nuffield had another in the ingenious design of Tom Scutt. Only a few evenings before I'd been enjoying his realist Irish pub in The Weir. This time the set was a cell-like box, and the audience was divided into four groups, each one watching from behind a two-way mirror. The actors were thus endlessly repeated in multiple reflections, and the audience - each group was given a group number - were placed in the position of voyeurs or onlookers of some interrogation room. These visuals brilliantly brought out the mood and meanings of the piece. The bare set brought out the chilly emotional world we were in, though the lack of scene change made it difficult to see immediately the difference between the first two sons: Lex Shrapnel changed voice and body language but the identical clothes (why, if the two men were so different?) was a tad confusing. I'd love to know how they suddenly got jackets and an extra chair for the final scene. Behind a screen, with voices heard through speakers, the actors seemed close yet distant. As well as delivering the play with thrilling effectiveness, it was an inspiring prompt to find simple and innovative approaches to our own stage work. Under new director Sam Hodges, the Nuffield is making exciting things happen. I'm looking forward to the next big show, Headlong's production of Anya Reiss's version of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening.



Wednesday 19 February 2014

Coriolanus

Before seeing the live screening of Coriolanus today I took in an episode of House. It brought out the issue central to both works, namely the problem of the Great Man: how do society and the special individual, endowed with extraordinary talent, accommodate each other? The answer is not very well at all. House, brilliant diagnostician, behaves with total and amused contempt for societal and institutional norms, and his genius, while saving paitents, moves like a giant wrecking ball through the lives of those around him. Coriolanus, great warrior and orator, is similarly aloof from the world of dingy democracy. It's a preoccupation where Shakespeare does seem to be in tune with the modern mind. In play after play, we see a Great Man (and, arguably two Great Women, Lady M and Cleopatra) floundering and unable to function in the political world: Macbeth, Antony, Hamlet, Lear, Brutus. Fast forward to now and we have our own succession of genius figures outside the net of normality: the genius must be Asperger-y (Sherlock, and SH is the obvious inspiration for House, himself inspired by a doctor), or latent badass (Walter White) or, commonest of all, maverick cop held back by the (often corrupted) rules, from Dirty Harry onwards. We pay for society by either reining in the great ones - and our own capacity for greatness - by the banality of politics, or leave them to roam the badlands of our imagination.

But back to Coriolanus, in the Donmar Warehouse production starring Tom Hiddleston and directed by Josie Rourke. What a luxury to see these sell-out productions from the comfort of a cinema seat without the hassle and costs of travel. Recent visits to screeings of Macbeth, The Queen and Billy Budd remain as vivid as any 'real' theatrical experience. There was much to enjoy here. Hiddleston's central performance was magnetic. Mark Gatiss was in great form as Menenius, in which he simply and effectively slipped the equally patrician establishment Mycroft into blank verse. Peter de Jersey (Cominius) gave an admirable exposition of fluent verse-speaking, and Deborah Findlay found a human angle on the original tiger mum Volumnia (though how this palpably and irritatingly bonkers mum manages to persuade her son at the end continues to mystify me). The lovely Birgitte Hjort Sorenson was imported from Borgen in order to look sexy and upset as Virgilia, which must be one of the worst-written parts in the canon (the character is simply obliterated by Volumnia or Coriolanus in every scene). Hadley Fraser was a bluff and believable Aufidius, who delivered the ultra-weird homoerotic bondage speech convincingly and had a good line in dental stops. A small company, so there was no crowd for the Tribunes to appeal to (coluldn't some of them have thrown on a cloak of some kind?) leaving the supposed clamour of the hungry masses in the hands of a couple of graffiti artists: still, what you lose in large scale you make up in small, and the chamber quality of most of the piece came over strongly here.

I found myself admiring the staging a good deal. Donmar Warehouse, as it happens, is about the same size as my own school theatre and there was a good deal to learn about simple and clear effects: I liked seeing the company around the stage in the first part (does this Brechtian device ever not work?), the painted areas on the stage, the strong use of top and backlighting, unfussy costumes, blink-and-you-miss them scene changes with minimal props, moderate use of digital projection and effective blocking in the round. No condescending efforts were made to remind us all of the contemporary relevance: the waving of order papers was a nice touch.  And the final coup de théatre ended the production on a strong visual note. On a day where Michael Grandage's comments that theatre audiences should be trusted to rise to the demands of art, this was a clear demonstration of that philosophy in action.

A Taste of Honey

A revival of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958) has just opened at the National Theatre, with  Lesley Sharp and Kate O'Flynn playing the mother and daughter carving out some kind of existence in a drab flat in Salford. Delaney was only nineteen when she wrote the play, and there is a feeling throughout of a young person's acute observations and ear for speech pouring through the text, bringing energy, affection and sharp intelligence to a picture of pain and struggle. Describing the 'plot' would make the play sound like a misery-fest: faithless sailors, drunkards, shattered dreams, unplanned pregnancy, a central relationship constantly teetering on breaking point. Ee but it's grim. Yet what comes over most strongly is the verbal energy, the crackling, give-as-good-as-you-get exchanges, a salty and unsentimental sparring that is the escape route from self-pity, the sound of the refusal to despair. 


The programme contrasts the working-class realism of Delaney with the drawing room dramas of Rattigan and Coward (it was watching a Rattigan play and feeling she could do better that apparently spurred Delaney into writing the script and sending it to Joan Littlewood); and the situations - unmarried pregnant girl helped by gay art student while mum is being left by boozy good-for-nothing charmer! - must have seemed shockingly new to Londoners in the 50s. Yet in retrospect one also sees links between the theatrical generations: it is not such a distance from the lonely world of, say, Separate Tables, to Delaney's Salford; and beyond the class gap there is surely a continuum between the verbal punch-ups of Private Lives and the give-and-take of a Taste of Honey. Drama, after all, lives on dysfunction. A Rattigan drawing room can contain a whole cosmos of grief. A further context is the new literature depicting working-class life, described by Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy and fictionalised by John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Barry Hines et al. While Jeanette Winterson's programme essay rightly stresses how theatre at the time was a man's world, it's worth remembering there were other kindred spirits in the literary sphere - Nell Dunn, Margaret Forster and - closest of all perhaps to the situation of the play - Lynne Reid Banks's The L-Shaped Room, sensitively adapted as a film by Bryan Forbes. Delaney's work now appears as a distinctive part of the complex revelation (to the rest of the country) of the lives of working people. It is a world open to the Hovis-ad sentiment, and we need to recalibrate our imaginations to recapture the real world in which these women live: the photos of the Salford of the time point to a dismal poverty scarcely distinct from Orwell's Wigan.




The NT production brought out the strengths of the play, which are surely the full-blooded women's parts. While admiring the lead actresses' physical and vocal relish for their roles,  I was left wondering whether this richness is won at the cost of somewhat one-dimensional male parts. So be it: it is in the introduction of specifically women's issues that the play now seems most revolutionary. There is the usual NT issue of filling huge spaces. Though this was at the Lyttleton not the Olivier,  the design team made the simple drab flat setting into something bigger and more beautiful, with a revolving set, atmospheric attic, silhouette of the gasworks and suggestion of a row of terraced houses. This does place the characters in a larger society, but the claustrophobic world of the play seems to call out for an intimate space. Two hours and a half of largely plotless dialogue was pushed along with great energy, spots of choreography (though do you really need a 'movement director' to do about twenty seconds of hoofing around with a broom?) and some mellow jazz.


After A Taste of Honey Delaney virtually stopped writing. Apparently she was stung by poor notices of her next play, The Lion in Love, and her precarious self-confidence toppled. Then nothing happened for about twenty years, apart from some stories, after which she did some radio work (and films: I had no idea she did the screenplay for Dance with a Stranger). One senses there must have been more to this silence than bad reviews. Perhaps she said what she had to say in this one piece? The play ends with a song to new life, and whatever the reasons for her silence, Delaney's work had many children: the lyrics of Morrissey, the films of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, Coronation Street, Our Friends in the North. Yet her voice remains distinctive, tragic and comic, strident and tender, and it was good to have a chance to hear it so clearly delivered in this resonant production.

The Weir

I was reluctant to see Conor Macpherson's The Weir in London, as I didn't see how anything could measure up to the radio version I'd heard with the original cast, including the wonderful Jim Norton as Jack. Some experiences are so strong one is afraid that any repeat will be disappointing. But two independent recommendations (thanks, Simon and Mara - neither of whom will read this) prevailed and I went to see the Donmar production, now transferred to Wyndham's at the heart of the West End. Seeing it unfold on stage I noticed further layers to this rich and mysterious work. There was more comedy in the theatre: some of the laughter seemed slightly willed, like the guffaws at Brian Cox (Jack) wiping his feet at the opening, but there was some terrific comic business that had to be seen: Brendan's crestfallen face when Valerie asks for wine, the subsequent pouring, the wonderful awkward tableau around the table, and the embarrassed reactions to Jim's tale to name a few golden moments. And what seemed pure pathos to the ear took on a lighter key on stage, such as Jim's lovely 'You're very nice' to Valerie, sad and sweet at the same time.


What an extraordinary play it is. There seems to be no plot and yet it has the trajectory of a perfect story arc, taking us through the shared telling of tales through pain to deeper understanding. The Weir finds in a country pub a perfect vehicle for the great human themes: loneliness, loss, companionship, memory and the imagination, displacement, all triggered by the arrival of an attractive young women among a group of men. The opening of a weir. Like Joyce's 'The Dead' the gregariousness is a foil to the shadows beyond. And the writing, too, is marvellous in its sure pacing, its perfect balancing of light and dark. I didn't quite get on stage the overwhelming pathos of Jack's 'sandwich' story, and perhaps the full power of Valerie's tale can only come over the first time you experience the play. Yet the cheer and warmth of the fire, the sharing of space, the signs of renewed life in Valerie (beautifully played by Dervla Kirwan) all came over beautifully. So the moral is, if you've seen it, now listen to it (some good soul has put it on YT), and if you've heard it, go and see a top-notch cast deliver one of the great plays of the last fifty years.