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Balancing acts
by Timothy O'Brien
Circa’s 2008 programme got off to a stylish start with Armslength at Circa 2.
Branwen Millar’s play concerns the interconnected loves and aspirations of five people looking for balance between their desire for happy relationships and their ambitions for successful careers.
Elsie (Kate Prior) is a photojournalist who has returned home to study art photography with her hero Julie (Emma Robinson), who has made the same transition. Julie is also mentor of Steve (Jamie McCaskill) who lives with Elsie’s unhappy sister Ruth (Abby Marment). Ruth is supporting Steve’s studies. On the edge is Harry (Eli Kent), a nerdy PhD student who hero-worships Julie: her photograph of the Aurora Borealis led him to his scientific career.
The playwright makes fine chamber music with this quintet, weaving themes of betrayal, hope, loss and love – both requited and unfulfilled – into a sophisticated entertainment.
The story is set within a fable of people who leave their worlds to find the poles where the world will revolve around them. Sensing the “ideal other” at the opposite pole they find their way to them, but after initial happiness together, the longing to be an individual again inevitably arises.
This is an only slightly despairing conclusion. For many, it may be a bitter-sweet truth. Fortunately, the entertainment is so beguiling we are happy to revel in the wit of the dialogue, the appeal of the brittle characters and our hope that things will turn out well for them.
The cast move around director and designer Stephen Bain’s stylish set of brushed-metal panels as if in a rather smart cocktail bar. The panels conceal a stunning coup de theatre –the icing on the cake of this elegant production.
Armslength is perfect summer evening entertainment. We should look forward to more from this young local writer.
Circa’s main stage (Circa One) has Nina Raine’s Rabbit, a play set in very similar territory.
Five twentysomething London professionals have gathered in a London wine bar to celebrate the 29th birthday of Bella (Tania Nolan).
Bella has a successful career in PR and is far better off than her friends, with the possible exception of city-investment type Tom (Matt Minto), a former lover whom she has invited to join the party on a whim.
In the background is another story – that of her dying father (Peter Vere-Jones) whose scenes with her are interpolated rather like the fable in Armslength.
The other partygoer is her long-term, live-in, recently ditched boyfriend Richard (Sam Snedden), a barrister and would-be writer who longs to reunite with her but can’t help drawing attention to Bella’s emotional issues and faults.
Rounding out the party are trainee-surgeon Emily (Danielle Mason) and Sandy (Mel Dodge), good time girl and writer.
As the characters wittily slice and dice each other, we realise that Bella has created emotional havoc all around her. She is tortured by the emptiness of her success and despises her mother’s life of service but longs for similar meaning in her own life. She purports to hate her father for destroying her mother’s career: at the same time, her father’s values are what she admires and emulates.
That, at least, seems to be the play’s aim. But it doesn’t quite succeed in developing that point because the scenes with Bella’s father aren’t integrated with the rest of the play except by an incompletely realised Proustian memory theme. What you come away with is a variation on the old notion, “A girl loves her daddy best.”
Still, Rabbit’s success in London comes as no surprise – its dazzling surface enables you to forget that nothing much is going on. The attractive cast, set in the round by director Bruce Phillips, deliver fine, smart performances.
One minor cavil is the decision not to attempt British accents. These are people of a particular class and social background; the right accent would add an edge to the dialogue.
Like its counterpart in Studio 2, Rabbit is an enjoyable entertainment. But on writing merit alone, it was Branwen Millar’s play that deserved the larger stage.
