To Kill A Mockingbird, Treasure Island, Dolly West’s Kitchen

16 Aug 2005 in Dance & Drama

Pitlochry Festival Theatre, until October 2005

To Kill a Mockingbird.

TO SEE THE three remaining plays which have recently come on stream at Pitlochry meant two consecutive over-night stays in the bustling, tourist-packed town. If you can find the time – and accommodation – to stay there for a whole week, all six plays can be seen, and for drama enthusiasts, it will prove to be very rewarding.

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, Christopher Sergel’s clever adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel, was gripping, brilliantly acted, and intelligently directed by John Durnin, the Artistic Director at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. Gregory Peck played the defence attorney Atticus Finch in the 1962 movie. The book, despite mixed critical reviews, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and sold over two million copies.

The cast of sixteen were as professionally expert as would be expected at PFT. They kept the rhythms of the scenes flowing along beautifully despite some fairly lengthy lumps of dialogue in early parts of the play. Dominic Brewer and Aoibheann O’Hara convincingly portrayed Scout and Jeremy, Atticus’s two exasperating and noisy teenage children. These are always greatly prized parts when this play is produced.

In the famous court scene when the negro Tom Robinson (played by Joel Trill) was on trial, I felt that the reactions of many of the non-speaking characters when confrontations and outbursts surfaced among the principal players sometimes seemed just a bit too meek and mild for this strong drama of racial hatred and bigotry to remain taut.

In all other respects, a brilliantly acted play with a rattling good story.

Coincidentally, [Dolly West’s Kitchen] has unmistakable resonance of today’s tensions brought about by bombings in the UK and the current “end of the war” situation in Ireland.

‘Treasure Island’, adapted by Grace Barnes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s book, was pre-eminently impressive and superbly entertaining, employing almost every theatrical technique and trick in the book. All eighteen of this season’s actors were involved and, as with ‘Mockingbird’, it was directed brilliantly by John Durnin.

This is indeed a “landmark production” for PFT. The complicated movements of great chunks of The Hispaniola as they were shoved on and off stage were great fun to watch, and all Stevenson’s great and colourful characters are there – Long John Silver, Jim Hawkins, Ben Gunn, and the rest.

There is really little more to say other than to advise parents to take their children along to see it. If children, or former children, who recall difficulties with the story or found the book boring in any way, or the story difficult to follow, seeing this play will change their literary lives for ever. In short, magnificent is only word for this production.

Finally, ‘Dolly West’s Kitchen’ by Frank McGuinness, one of the great Northern Irish playwrights, is outrageously funny, wicked, and, if there’s any fluid ounce of Irish in you, agonising and heart-aching. The script is razor-sharp in its wit and wisdom; the language used is melodious, indeed almost singable. Helen Logan as the blunt, outspoken, and yet loveable Dolly, is just wonderful.

Dolly West’s kitchen is the hub of debate, argument, wild disagreements, grief, and, in stark contrast, incongruously growing out of all these, love and romance. On stage, the kitchen table is tilted towards the audience giving the minimal set greater dimension and immediacy for the characters who circle it, slam it, thump it, battle over it, and of course, fall in love round it.

It is a very funny play, and scarcely a sentence slips by without some gentle Irish humour being flung at the audience or in passages of dialogue that force the audience to listen intently lest a morsel of the delicious subtlety is missed.

BUT BEWARE, this play is not for children. The f-word is there in abundance during one part of the play. There’s a relatively innocent sex scene to be observed, and the identity battles between the Irish, the American, and British Armies towards the end and just after the 1939-45 war, would be beyond most young minds who will have no awareness of the international complexities which existed at the time. It’s an adult play.

Coincidentally, this new play has unmistakable resonance of today’s tensions brought about by bombings in the UK and the current “end of the war” situation in Ireland. The last lines in the play express this clearly.

After such fast moving, fast speaking, realistic fist fights, the lively action throughout, and the speed of the dialogue, the last fifteen minutes of the play, when the forgive and forget scenes wind up the story, there was a welcome slacking of tension to send the audience away, uplifted by the writing. The brilliant direction by Benjamin Twist wholly fulfilled and thoroughly entertained.