FringeReview UK 2024
Rika’s Rooms
The Playground Theatre Gail Louw Season
Genre: Adaptation, Contemporary, Fringe Theatre, Historical, New Writing, Solo Play, Theatre
Venue: The Playground Theatre, Latimer Road W10 6RQ
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Gail Louw’s International Season of four plays at the Playground Theatre continues with Rika’s Rooms, performed by Emma Wilkinson Wright and directed by Anthony Shrubsall, at Playground Theatre till March 10th.
It began with Blonde Poison, continues with Girl in the Green Sweater, from 12th to 24th March, and concludes with Storming! from 27th to 31st March
Emma Wilkinson Wright manages the narrative as an odyssey punctuated by screams. It’s a pretty phenomenal performance and the actor is so wholly immersed in Rika you know you’re in the presence of something remarkable.
Gail Louw’s International Season of four plays at the Playground Theatre continues with Rika’s Rooms, performed by Emma Wilkinson Wright and directed by Anthony Shrubsall, at Playground Theatre. Set Design and Costume Mal Arcucci, Lighting Design Peter Petr Vocka, Stage Manager David Hunt, Stage Manager and Operator Lander Martinez Garcia, Designer Artwork John Rayment.
Emma Wilkinson Wright manages the narrative as an odyssey punctuated by screams. It’s a pretty phenomenal performance and the actor is so wholly immersed in Rika you know you’re in the presence of something remarkable,
Till March 10th.
It continues with Girl in the Green Sweater, from 12th to 24th March, and Storming! from 27th to 31st March.
Review
“In actual fact, I might want to be a socialist if I understood what it meant, but I don’t want to live on the kibbutz and not have my own stuff. I mean, I really don’t want to wear big fat Yudit’s knickers.’”
Gail Louw’s International Season of four plays at the Playground Theatre continues with Rika’s Rooms, performed by Emma Wilkinson Wright and directed by Anthony Shrubsall, at Playground Theatre till March 10th.
It began with Blonde Poison, continues with Girl in the Green Sweater, from 12th to 24th March, and concludes with Storming! from 27th to 31st March.
Finally this singular and irreplaceable dramatist is getting long-overdue recognition: and not just in the UK, but in Israel, South Africa and elsewhere.
In November, Playground Theatre featured two of Louw’s solo plays: The Good Dad and The Mitfords which featured the actor performing here: Emma Wilkinson Wright (The Changeling, Southwark, The Mitfords Edinburgh Fringe, Louw’s The Only White, Chelsea).
After a rehearsed reading at Jermyn Street in December, this revised work now returns for 90 minutes plus a 15-minute interval.
Though acclaimed for many plays over the past two decades (Louw was a late starter) with three Methuen/Bloomsbury collected volumes to her credit, has done something unusual: adapt.
Rika’s Rooms is based on Louw’s first novel. And that fiction is based on her mother’s experience. But her mother isn’t quite Rika. Freedom-fighter, coloniser, housewife, terrorist, victim, oppressor? Rika doesn’t even know at 76, what room she’s in.
And deftly, Louw suggests neither do we for a millisecond. We adjust and Wilkinson Wright with her voice-coach background illuminates with a gravelly Rika aged 76, a child’s high tessitura, never over-emphasised, and that of a spirited, selfish, sexually eager young woman, compromised by the 20th century; but not for long.
She also enacts a Bristolian carer and a concerned young doctor, as well as Rika’s exasperated daughter.
Louw’s drama builds on the way she sashays bewitchingly, and fluidly through decades and states of mind.
The novel’s sashaying method too is easy to follow. The drama in Wilkinson Wright’s hands is even easier. Much of the first act draws us back to Rika’s 76-year-old present, with confused reflexes of what we learn is her history. She twice tries strangling her carers, states she’s a murderer. She brings up people her daughter’s never heard of, particularly one Nathan.
Much is essential framing: though realised as here, the sheer exposition of dementia sections are longer than I recalled, occasionally more dilated than necessary and loads the arc of Act One.
The sheer power of these though is exceptionally wrought, the impact on the audience palpable. Wilkinson Wright’s often taken to an almost dotted rhythm of extremes, a taxing brief she handles consummately
There’s relief in the second act where it’s less foregrounded – and this act particularly sings with fluidity, variety and pitch. Some of this might have ideally been placed at the end of Act One, the break a little later in the storyline.
Louw has condensed the 224-page novel into essentially the first half of Rika’s experience, with a brief coda. So we’re brisked through Germany and Rika’s parents sending her to safety to Palestine to be with her sister and aunt; then her experience of sexual wakening with the long-desired Nathan in Palestine.
It’s twisted with a sexual obsession so sharp that Rika only wants to know of his fate in an undercover rescue-bid in 1943 Hungary, not the death of 23-year-old greatly gifted poet and comrade Hannah. “But what about Nathan?” Rika asks through her sister’s outrage. It’s an index of a one-track sexual obsession and a less than lovely conscience. That feeling though is seismically altered with more news.
Those screams rise in intensity, never overdone in the flashbacks. There’s a crescendo of grief and self-discovery. Climactically, Rika’s ordered by the Irgun in the wake of emotional emptiness to seduce a kindly British colonel and experiences conflicting emotions as “my body says something else” and she responds to his warmth and gentleness as a lover and man. “I came like I never come before” she puts it plainly. Yet she leaves him after just one night, at the King David Hotel: a key point the Jewish-British conflict of 1946.
Shortly after she meets Morris, the South African who’ll marry her. And Nathan again. The scenes in South Africa, and her developing non-relationship with servant Dina, are flashlit through to the end as a coda. In two halves and at one hour 40, there’s no time to explore the latter half of the novel. As drama this is almost the right cut. I’d still like to know a few more strokes of that settling mantle of South African colonialism. And swap them for a few strokes less of distress in Act One.
Mal Arcucci’s Set is a diptych of Suffolk-pink panels studded with pictures: stage right there’s a bedroom, and opposite a circular table, fruit, a world with a green telephone. In between there’s a space used in the second act: a numinous upstage, at times lit hauntingly with red, often a Kibbutz.
We could have done with more of that earlier on. The naturalistic set acts as a concave intensifier so Wilkinson Wright is crowded downstage. There’s excellent costume changes which the actor handles deftly too. Peter Petr Vocka’s lighting shimmers with some finely sculpted takes on darkness and broad noon. There’s artfully sparing use of soundscape by Lander Martinez Garcia, including train sounds and sourced period music from Jerusalem in the 1930s.
There’s treasurable moments to give a taste of what’s to come:
“‘Let them look at someone else for a change, not us. Keep schtum, close your mouth, close your eyes and enjoy the sunshine and the milk and the honey!’
“So a Jew must only ever do what is right for other Jews, not other human beings?” I ask.
“Go to sleep, Rika, do me a favour.’”
“‘What!” he says.
“We don’t have sexual intercourse anymore?” I say.
“Ma!’ he says, ‘I’m your daughter for Christ’s sake!”
“Yes,’ I say, ‘that’s what you always say.’”
Wilkinson Wright manages the narrative as an odyssey punctuated by screams. It’s a pretty phenomenal performance and the actor is so wholly immersed in Rika you know you’re in the presence of something remarkable.
