FringeReview UK 2023

Knocking On The Wall

Georgie Polhill for Dryad Theatre in Association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre

Genre: Drama, Fringe Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Finborough Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“I have been twice buried and twice exhumed” the laconic Ena Lamont Stewart (1912-2006) commented after one production of these plays. Here in three plays written and set in 1973 (though the title play Knocking On The Wall was completed by 1978) directed at the Finborough by Finlay Glen we get something of Lamont Stewart’s measure.

Involving eight characters, five actors in three studies, two almost miniatures, they depict people reaching out of loneliness, often flailing, often suffering acute distress. There’s real-time naturalism, shivered with muted crisis, and pre-recorded audio for interior monologues: they seem ahead of their time.

Lamont Stewart is best known for Men Should Weep (1947) dealing with a Gorbals family struggling with poverty: it’s been nominated at the National and elsewhere as one of the 50 greatest British plays of the 20^th century. Whilst these works, two of them two-handers, the last with a cast of four, don’t attempt that scale and reach, they’re shot through with the same quality.

Towards Evening

Sixty-year-old academic Leonard (Robert Hands, urbane and distilled Edinburgh don on the fade) has come unannounced to live with single sister Edie (Jannette Foggo, excellent in her arc of pained disclosure), whom he’s not contacted for years. As Edie points out, women think of the men in their lives, even silent brothers, far more than they think of them.

Both have lived lonely. Raised by their unloving aunt and uncle after their parents’ death, they’ve found intimacy a challenge too. But Edie at least burns with its lack. Despite a scholarship to Fettes, worldwide career as a lecturer, and propensity to quote Landor, Cough, Coleridge, Leonard is unfulfilled. A poem he quotes after being asked by Edie if he was ever in love, hints as much as he dares. Edie by contrast, was gifted Black Beauty by a boy who subsequently kissed her behind the blackboard and told her “I love you.” No-one has ever said that again. She was nine.

Leonard’s interior monologue gently disparages Edie’s stupidity. But then she was never intended to excel at school, had no looks and has lived a life of quiet desperation alone. The crisis comes through recollection not action: it’s these reveals bubbling up at flash-points that Lamont Stewart excels at. So around a recent mistake of Edie selling the wrong pile of books (Leonard’s beloved prize-Oxford Verse, and Palgrave) wholly by mistake as Leonard kept changing his mind, there’s accusations of jealousy. There’s a resolution, whisky, tea, eating at 2am.

Walkies Time For a Black Poodle

There’s a shrewd bit of class-reversal making inherent tensions even richer in this short. Nouveau-riche ex-council estate Ella Brown (Joanne Gallagher, brittle with hard-won status) and privately-educated cleaner Maggie Rintoul (Jannette Foggo, somewhere west of Jean Brodie).

Like the previous work, there’s a long solo introduction, but not in this piece pre-recorded: thus Ella’s on the phone desperately reaching out to her oldest friend. But it’s clear she’s cut off from her roots, disdained by those left behind, and regarded as too ignorant to show off to rich high-achieving couples by her tyro husband.

Maggie’s not Maggie’s real name though “it’ll do” Maggie counters with a touch of hauteur; but it’s not Smith, it’s Rintoul. What follows is an exquisite unravelling of secrets from Ella, Gallagher softening as Foggo’s Maggie grows quietly more assertive. When it comes to Maggie’s reveal the name of “John” sets up a surname and with that a ferocity’s revealed. It’s a shaft of stark loneliness shared. Just.

Knocking On The Wall

Despite Hallowe’en still echoing, this isn’t a ghost story. Accountant Isobel Smart (Joanne Gallagher’s bossy efficiency, a notch up on Ella’s fragile carapace) whose home this is, is off to the dentist’s, leaving post-breakdown sister Dorothy (Jasmine Hyde) to wait for the plumber. Hence knocking around the leak. But of course there’s more than one kind.

His apprentice Alec McClean (Matt Littleson) shows but Mr Brown (Robert Hands) is visiting his wife in hospital after an op. Alec who’s not served his time yet (great set-up for misreading) can do nothing. Dorothy, tasked with only offering the cheap china is discovered by cheery Alec singing her take on Seeger: “Where have all the dentists gone?” “gone to America every one” and for the remainder of the play, is shocked out of defensiveness into something else. Aliterate Alec, who can glance at the Sun (“Crisis? What Crisis?” sets it precisely) surprises himself with his verbal dexterity twining with Dorothy’s.

This comes after an inadvertent move by Alec setting up a violent response, leaving no doubt of Dorothy’s breakdown, and the pair soon bond. Dorothy falls to a game on the vicarage cats alphabetic qualities, A-T anyway. Hyde conveys both Dorothy’s extreme jumpiness and panic, and perhaps a 1970s take on distress. It’s the virtuoso performance in an evening of deftly-nuanced studies.

A horrendous teaching experience has left Dorothy shredded. What Hyde brings out is Dorothy’s natural gifts, her certainty her sister is jealous (echoes of Edie and Leonard, though more justified) and her capacity for joy.

Littleson edges blokeiness with genuine warmth, and there’s a moment of intimacy as his arm casually slips round the back of the sofa, cusping Dorothy’s neck.

It can’t last, especially when first an almost aphasic Mr Brown arrives, then Isobel returns. But Dorothy’s changed, and a confrontation and sudden physical gesture points to healing, even love. There’s a quiet radiance about this play. Though all three point to accommodation of loneliness, a resolution, in this at least, you feel there’s a shaft of hope.

Delyth Evans varies the lightly-caged set with occasional slotted part-walls, different carpets and seat-coverings (fuddy-paisley; stark chic white; prosperous, assured yellows) props in a hallucinated realism; her costumes follow suit. Zoé Ritchie’s lighting cleverly runs a Miriam Buether-like floor-light strip around the first and third plays; with overhead lighting in the garish nowhere-to-hide second. Hattie North’s sound riffs 1973 pop: most plangent in the third with John Denver’s ‘I’m leaving on a jet-plane’ and Pete Seeger’s ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ the main character’s use of which nails her desperate bursts of fun. And a blast of T-Rex’s ‘20^th Century Boy’ on an apprentice’s tranny.

Exquisite slivers of a great talent, this three-piece-suite could not be more expressively rendered than at the Finborough, home of such miniatures, and occasionally, epics.

Published November 3, 2023November 3, 2023 by Simon Jenner