Brighton Year-Round 2024
Stoppard The Real Inspector Hound; Bartlett Contractions
Brighton Little Theatre
Genre: Comedic, Contemporary, Costume, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Satire, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Brighton Little Theatre
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Directed by Samuel Masters (The Real Inspector Hound) and Frankie Knight (Contractions) these plays make for a fascinating gear-change.
As ever it’s a more worthwhile production than several professional ones we’re likely to see.
Review
Like last year, Brighton Little Theatre’s autumn season leads off with a sold-out double-bill. This time it makes for one of the strangest fits I’ve seen, though both works are satires. Stoppard’s farcical early (1962) The Real Inspector Hound should ideally follow Mike Bartlett’s ink-black 2008 satire Contractions. Its genial absurdism would make for a more natural conclusion. When the Stoppard was shown at Chichester in 2010, it was followed by Sheridan’s The Critic.
It has to be this way though. Contractions is the shorter: its starkly effective set far easier to retain when the more complex Stoppard one is stripped out. And that too is the wonder of BLT. How on one day these sets are set up, stripped and returned twice over is a miracle of BLT’s secret guild and (here) Steven Adams’ design. Directed by Samuel Masters (The Real Inspector Hound) and Frankie Knight (Contractions) these plays make for a fascinating gear-change.
The Real Inspector Hound
Masters has managed some theatrical coups in this production. We start with two critics, Birdboot (James Bennison) crashing through the audience door entrance, and Moon (Esther Draycott) occupying an audience seat joined opposite by Birdboot. Second-string Boot is standing in for his vanished senior, Higgs. And there’s even one below him, Puckeridge. This matters. They’ve come to read existential depth into Murder at Muldoon Manor, a truly dreadful spoof on every Christie from The Mousetrap to And Then There Were None.
Beverley Grover’s lighting and noirish music cues every time a supposed villain snakes past a balcony window. Steven Adams has supplied a classic set with wallpapers, false doors chaise-longs, more doors and a perfect chintzy Christie drawing-room. He has turned the volume up. So do the intrepid pair of critics. The duo crane necks round and address the audience.
At the end (just 75 minutes), there’s a deal of bodies to be dragged off: these, and other moments, break fourth walls and possibly health and safety regs. Though nominally a cast of eight, another body lies prone throughout: I have my suspicions.
Not that anyone notices the body, which proves literally a stumble to investigating who does what to whom. The play knocks twice: in the second iteration actress-philandering Birdboot is increasingly drawn into the role of stage philanderer Simon (Morgan Corby, full of an excellent faux-deliver style to the audience) when Simon has to go off. It’s really not a healthy decision. Whatever mousetraps there are seem doubly spun as the critics are drawn in, the cast seems to accept them in role, and other forces lurk. It’s ingenious and an object lesson… to critics. Stoppard was once a ‘second-string’ himself. This surely is his revenge.
Dracott first delivers at a frantic pace but soon modulates into a querulous, apprehensive critic who rightly sees trouble ahead. Her Moon intimates more humanity than the waning Moons I’ve seen. Stoppard may not mean that, but it works better. Bennison is possessed of a fine brazen voice modulated with petulance and outrage: just the histrionics for Birdboot. He projects though as if at the BOAT. In this intimate space he might consider lowering his excellent persona (he’s a seedily horrible predator, just as Dracott is down-at-heel-and-heart).
Caroline Lambe’s Mrs Drudge balances her Drudginess with sudden access to higher powers in her articulate exposition, with a wicked ear-to-door facility. Corby’s Simon quite apart from his consummately ghastly stand-and-deliver (a thing of hideous beauty and affect), is joined by soubrette Felicity (Madina Orazbekova) all athletic with tennis and wounded desire; and Cynthia (Phaedra Danelli) the current Simon conquest, striking amorous absurdities. Both naturally threaten death in different registers.
Wheelchair-bound Magnus (Bill Griffiths), brother of Cynthia’s long-vanished husband, has a nice line in spurious Canadian proverbs, crashing arrivals and a surprise. Michael Grant’s Inspector Hound isn’t the imposter you expect and runs through a gallimaufry of accents (there’s a clue). The supporting cast are – as one casually expects from BLT – excellent.
Even if you’ve seen it the denouement surprises: this production keeps that fresh.
Contractions
In all Mike Bartlett plays, there’s a python lurking: a greater or lesser insistence on entrapment. A protagonist is circled more and more tightly till there’s no way out. It’s there in Bull (2010, a companion to Contractions in its corporate bullying) famously Charles III (2014), the devised Game (2015) and to a degree the three-into-two Cock (2009) and complex ballet on heritage Albion (2017). It comes nastily, supremely to the fore in Contractions: 45 minutes of graphine-grey entrapment by corporate capitalism; the flayings of a person to efficiency. As one person put it to me, invoking 1984: “a person is forced to win a victory over themselves.”
Frankie Knight, known as an actor and mentored by Claire Lewis, marks an assured debut: the pace is just right, the bleakness brightly unremitting. The clock one feels should be striking thirteen.
Adams provides a set dazzling in literal black and white, as befits its theme. A spartan office, it recalls one of those stylish sets out of the 1960s iteration of The Avengers. The only colour is a beige table. Everything else from chairs to filter coffee the Manager helps just herself to, is black. Or white.
The Manager (Samantha Feree) calls in relatively new and high-performing Emma (Kez Price, returning after two years, and previously known as Keziah Israel). Over 15 scenes she grills Emma on a possible relationship with co-worker Darren. Over months she probes every intimate detail corroborated with (mostly) compliant Darren. The Manager suggests then decrees the relationship must end on a particular date. The awkwardness of pregnancy and subsequent maternity leave is implied, in that faced with dismissal and blacklisting, Emma must decide not to have a baby anymore; let alone share parenting with Darren that would, simply by a bond, re-sexualise the relationship in Orwellian company-speak. It doesn’t do their high-flying figures any good. Darren is relocated to Kiev, but they want him back.
Throughout Ferree is every nuanced inch the inhuman smiling Manager who refuses even to divulge her name. “Do you bleed?” Emma whips back ferociously, twice. But Ferree’s Manager is implacable. She can force Emma to starve. By the end you believe killing her and setting fire to the office is the only thing to do. Emma though can only destroy what they wish her to. And that might include herself.
Ferree, a professional actor returning after several years, is a real addition to the BLT roster: her Manager glints poise, the nuance of managers we might know, twisted with Bartlett’s impersonal evil. Price, consummate in many things here, finds new modes of resistance in Emma. She seizes on every nuance of Bartlett’s script to show a kick each time she leaves or confronts. There’s a visceral action not in Bartlett, and it’s inspired. This makes Emma’s humanity all the more precious, her fall the more terrifying. Price does latterly explode in vocal extremes I’ve not seen: some may feel too much so for the piece’s slithering boa-constructor movement. It doesn’t trouble me so much.
Written in 2008, when writers like Mark Fisher were just finishing works on Capitalist Realism (“Is there no alternative?”), it’s a horribly prescient play too: this was after all before austerity, possibly reacting to the Crash of that year.
With themes of grief, pregnancy, a baby’s death flagged as triggers, this coupling makes for an unsettling pendant to murderous high jinks. As ever though, it’s a more worthwhile production than several professional ones we’re likely to see.
Directed by Samuel Masters (The Real Inspector Hound) and Frankie Knight (Contractions)
Set Design and Construction Steven Adams, Set Construction & Painting Tom Williams
Lighting Design, Lighting & Sound Operation Beverley Grover
Stage Managers (The Real Inspector Hound) Vicky Horder, Jo Gatford, Stage Manager (Contractions) Paul Charlton, Costumes (The Real Inspector Hound) Christine Cox
Production Photography Miles Davies
Special Thanks to Paul Charlton , Tess Gill, Andrew Bird and Mimi Goddard (Samuel Masters) The BLT committee, Suzanne Heritage, Claire Lewis (Frankie Knight)
Till September 21st
