Nova Scotia - John Byrne

 Nova Scotia (2008) is the fourth part of Byrne's Slab Boys tetralogy.   It brings things into the era of devolved Scotland and cell phones.  It is not as powerful as the first and second plays of the trilogy (the second is not very good at all - see my review below from late last year).   Sex and death are not such motivators for those in late middle age.   And Byrne makes far too much of the new mobile technology.   We must be thankful he didn't carry the story on into smartphone territory.

Phil McCann is still the dropout painter of 1958 who has failed to ever drop in.   His young partner Didi, though, is hugely successful, her installations have her up for the Turner Prize and a possible Thames & Hudson book.   Didi supports Phil in a Highland Castle.   The action takes place in the garden area where Phil has built himself a studio which every else assumes is where they store their bins.

Didi has given permission for an arts feature to be made in the grounds.   What no one has yet realised is that the subject is Phil's old mate from the Slab Boys, George 'Spanky' Farrell, now a living legend in LA, and now back with the sex-bomb of the old print shop, Lucille, who was also briefly married to Phil.   Lucille and Phil's son Miles is directing the feature.   Miles has also been doing some research into the complex family tree, using a technology that is highly relevant to the plot, DNA.

There are some fine moments in the play, notably regarding the DNA, which those familiar with Byrne's story will be able to guess.   Phil, of course, is a version of Byrne, though nowhere near so famous or successful.   Is Didi Tilda Swanson?   Only in terms of age difference.   Is Spanky Gerry Rafferty?   Possibly.   These are the games Byrne encourages us to play.   Nova Scotia is, generally, a fun game, a fitting swansong for Byrne's theatrical career.   The book, like its predecessor, also gives us his drawings, which are as brilliant as ever.   

The Sleepers Den - Peter Gill

 The Sleepers Den is an early play by Gill, mounted at the Royal Court in 1965 when he was only twenty-five.   This, in the collected edition, is a revised version, again at the Royal Court, from 1969.   In both versions the lead actress was the great Eileen Atkins, and I suspect much of the revision was an expansion of her final disintegration in Act Three.

The play is indeed a vehicle for the leading actress, albeit in an extremely wretched, miserable setting.   In that sense it combines classical theatre tradition with the then modish working class, kitchen-sink model.   The life of the Shannons is crammed into a single multi-purpose room in the rundown slum housing they rent.   Mrs Joan Shannon runs the household, which consists of her brother Frankie, her daughter Maria and her elderly bedfast mother.   There is, we are told early on, no Mr Shannon and seemingly never has been.   The title of the younger Mrs Shannon, Joan, is purely honorific.   We pretend that single motherhood was a trend of the late sixties but it was in fact very common in working class communities.   We had a neighbour in that situation and one of my godmothers was the same.

Both ladies I knew just ignored any criticism and got on with it.   Joan, though, shuts out the wider world.   She does not work, partly because she feels obliged to look after her mother.   Maria is too young to work and Frankie brings in the only income.   In fact Joan keeps her mother sedated with pills and treats herself to the odd luxury via the dreaded 'club'.   Now those chickens are coming home to roost.   The 'club' has referred her to its solicitors for non-payment and the Catholic Church has sent in one of its visitors to enquire after the older Mrs Shannon.   We discover, though Joan never does, that Frankie has been working extra hours and has stashed away a the overtime wages; it's only a few pounds but it would be more than enough to clear his sister's debt.   What Frankie is saving it for we never find out.   It's one of those questions that Gill cleverly wants to leave us with.

In the end Joan barricades herself in her world-room.   She even swaps places with her mother.   Is she mad?   Or is she just vocalising her agony?   Another question audience or reader can take away with them.

Vampire - Snoo Wilson

 Snoo Wilson (1948-2013) was one of the key playwrights of my youth.  Indeed, Vampire was first performed four months before I went to university to study drama for the first time in 1973.  At the time Wilson was the equal of David Hare, Trevor Griffiths and Howard Brenton and ahead of Stephen Poliakoff.  The others went on to commercial success whilst Wilson never really did.

Vampire isn't about a vampire at all.  It's really three loosely linked plays about the essence of vampirism - i.e. sex and death and, given that vampires are believed to start drinking the blood of family members - incest.

The longest and best of the three plays (or acts as Wilson insists on calling them) is the first, which is basically as two act play set in the mid 19th century in which a Welsh minister keeps a tight hold on his three young daughters because he fears they will discover sex - which, this being a play from 1973, they very much do.  Scene Two finds the minister visiting a brothel-cum-seance room to try and contact his beloved wife.  His most liberated daughter just happens to be the star attraction of the combined business.  The man of god ends up having incestuous sex with his daughter in a coffin, convinced that she is the ghost of his dead wife.

The product of this incestuous coupling ends up being the mother of Sarah, the lead character in Act Two, set on the eve of the First World War.  The fight for women's rights is now Suffragism.  Again, the structure is basically two acts, albeit these are too short to stand alone.  Here the second involves Sarah as Mary in a Nativity Play, during which she is examined by those eminent medics, Jung and Freud.

Act Three is a problem - so much so that Wilson was forever changing it in subsequent productions; one such change ended up being expanded into an entire play, one of Wilson's more successful ones, Soul of the White Ant.  The setting in this original version is contemporary London.  The women's movement is now so advanced that Marcia wants to be called Dwight.  Everything is very modern, very extreme (for 1973).  Nothing much happens and the play rather fizzles out.

But I like Vampire because of its rough and ready experimental nature.  Not everything works but the first half works extremely well and could and would and perhaps should stand alone, perhaps in a double bill with one of Wilson's shorter works.  We didn't know it at the time but the Seventies was a golden age for democratic British theatre - a long, long way from the sort of drivel that we today manage to squeeze in between the bloody musicals.

Southwark Fair - Samuel Adamson

 Samuel Adamson is an Australian playwright who has been living and working in London since the early Nineties.  Southwark Fair was produced at the National Theatre in 2006 with Rory Kinnear in the lead.  It is a London slice-of-life comedy, very much of its time.  That time was when being gay or from Eastern Europe was the biggest thing hip young Londoners had to worry about.  Things have changed so much in the last decade that Southwark Fair is now a period piece every bit as historical as The Importance of Being Earnest or The Way of the World.  Like them, it offers a snapshot of happier, better times.  Producers should consider reviving it if theatres ever reopen.  It is genuinely funny, with interesting characters and a clever structure which goes through scenes we have already seen from the other point of view (which could be off-putting were it not so brilliantly done).  I am neither gay nor from overseas and have never lived in London, or wanted to.  Yet I genuinely enjoyed reading Southwark Fair and would happily pay money to see it onstage.

Murmuring Judges - David Hare

The second in David Hare's state of the nation trilogy, Murmuring Judges is, as the title suggests, an examination of the state of the legal system and what, in legal terms, counts as a win. The play was first staged in 1991 and it's disappointing how little has changed. Indeed - the question is unavoidable - can it change? In a combative system there can only be winners and losers, and one of the upsides of criminal law is that there are no grey areas. Having just written that last clause, I'm asking myself if it needs qualification. There should be no grey areas - you are either guilty or you are not. The intractable problem of the legal profession where everyone from beat constable to Lord Chief Justice keeps a scorecard is that grey areas are too often made out to be black or white.

Gerard gets five years, which seems a bit unfair. He was only a peripheral player in the crime and has no previous. But still his barrister, Sir Peter, can live with it. It was, after all, only a Legal Aid case. Not the sort of thing he would usually tackle. So Gerard is a new prisoner and Sir Peter has a new pupil, Irina. She's very bright, of course; she's also black and beautiful. She looks good on Sir Peter's arm for an evening at the opera. Trouble is, she's interested in Gerard's case. She recognises the unfairness of the sentence and is concerned about something the main police witness said.

The witness is Barry, who has a reputation for closing cases. His girlfriend Sandra is also concerned about Gerard's sentence. She was present on the arrests and noticed something odd in the way Barry treated the senior, more hardcore criminals.

The scale is panoramic - something that could only really be staged by a massive, publicly-funded theatre company. There are lots of characters and lots of subplots. You can almost see Hare plotting his thesis on a huge whiteboard. And it's very, very good. In the end Gerard wins his appeal and gets six months reduction in sentence. So everyone's a winner - except Lady Justice.

I had forgotten how good David Hare can be. I followed him when we were both young and still have most of his plays from those years. He went upmarket in the Eighties whereas I became much more political, and I ceased to pay attention. I have, however, seen his more recent TV films and found much to be enjoyed. Clearly I have catching up to do.

Plays 2 - Stephen Poliakoff

Poliakoff really has a thing about his granddad, doesn't he? It's understandable - a Russian inventor turned British millionaire - but it so heavily stressed in three of the four plays here (and in the new TV series Summer of Rockets, which starts on BBC2 tomorrow night) that you can't help wishing he'd get over it.

Breaking the Silence (stage play, 1984) is fairly and squarely about old Joe P, albeit he's called Nikolai here. Nikolai is a rich Jewish inventor trying to get his family out of Bolshevik Russia whilst at the same time inventing sound film. It's a cracking, hugely ambitious piece which only a state supported theatre (in this case the RSC) could possibly mount. The whole thing is set on a railway carriage which gets shunted further and further away from centres of influence, whilst Nikolai half-heartedly pretends to be an official inspector. Trains are another recurring motif for Poliakoff. Poliakoff the young writer is, as ever, present in the character of Nikolai's son Sasha. Thus we have the perfect Poliakoff prototype: Sasha and the inventive Russian aristos on a Train going nowhere.

Playing with Trains (stage play, 1989) is an obvious continuation of the theme. In this case the inventor-father is British who has become rich by making key improvements to the inventions of others. Then he stakes everything on a revolutionary rail-road vehicle  - and fails. Here, the role of Sasha Poliakoff is shared between Bill's son Danny and the son Bill would like to have had, his co-inventor Mick. There are great ideas at play here but the play itself doesn't convince because it lacks all sense of place. The set is minimal to allow for quick changes, almost as if Poliakoff feels restricted by the stage and wants to move on to TV and film.

She's Been Away (TV film, 1989) is the exception here because it's not Russian, has nothing to do with anyone's grandfather, and the Sasha character isn't in it. It is not Poliakoff's first original work for TV; that was Stronger than the Sun in 1977, followed, inevitably, by Caught on a Train three years later).Lillian is the one who has been away, locked in a mental hospital for decades because of sexual shenanigans as a child. Her nephew Hugh, an honourable and rich man, has decided to do the right thing and provide her with a room in his mansion in Holland Park. Lillian (a late swansong for the great Peggy Ashcroft) is uncooperative, stubborn and resourceful but in the end she saves the day.  This is a charming, sensitive and thoughtful piece which, fortunately for us, Poliakoff continues to produce thirty years on.

Century is an actual movie, directed by Poliakoff, which came out on New Year's Eve 1993. Eccentric Russian granddad is back (played by Robert Stephens whose son Toby succeeds to the role in Summer of Rockets). Instead of Sasha our youthful protagonist is more akin to Stephen Poliakoff's brother, the eminent chemist Sir Martyn. It is New Year's Eve 1899, which Mr Reisner insists is the last day of the 19th century - a quirk which has set him at odds with his local council which rightly argues that the new century begins on January 1 1901. This is a good joke, reflecting the debate which was probably just beginning in 1993 about when we should celebrate the Millennium. Mr Reisner's son Paul is a newly qualified doctor, off to London to join the research institute newly founded by the celebrated Professor Mandry. New hope soon falters, however, when Paul discovers that Mandry is a pioneer of eugenics. That is a stunning turn of events, which Poliakoff handles magnificently, especially when eccentric Mr Reisner blunders in on the climactic confrontation.

Mourning Becomes Electra - Eugene O'Neill

Mourning Becomes Electra dates from 1932 when O'Neill was at the pinnacle of his powers and only a couple of years before he won the Nobel Prize.

Dramatically, it is a colossal enterprise: three full-length plays harking back to the very earliest surviving drama whilst remaining ostensibly naturalistic, and characters brimming over with (then) ultra-modern Freudian complexes. Because it is set in the immediate aftermath of the US Civil War, there is also an element of historicity.


The fundamental model is the Oresteia of Aeschylus (458BC), the only surviving Greek trilogy albeit it lacks his satyr play, which we know was called Proteus. In the original, Agamemnon returns from Troy to find that his family has turned in on itself in his absence. His wife is unfaithful, his children too emotionally entangled with each other to relate normally to the greater world. It's all to do with the curse that fell upon the House of Atreus (Agamemnon's father), who cheated the goddess Artemis of a golden lamb. I think...


In New England in the 1860s the Judge's wife Christine Mannon and her daughter Lavinia await the return of husband Ezra, a brigadier general in the victorious Union army, and brother/son Orin, who has been wounded in the head. Christine and Vinnie are at daggers drawn over sea captain Adam Brant, who Christine is sleeping with, who Vinnie might or might not have taken a shine to, and who is anyway the illegitimate son of Ezra's late brother, disowned for his lack of decorum by their father Abe. Ezra finally arrives home - the first play in the trilogy is 'Homecoming' - and Christine kills him with poison obtained by Brant.


'The Hunted' opens with the funeral of Ezra. Vinnie knows what her mother did and is more than half unhinged. Orin arrives, already knocked loopy by his head wound, and is driven properly off his head by shock. He and Vinnie follow their mother to Brant's ship - a ship owned, of course, by the Mannon family - and hear her plan to elope with him. Once Christine has gone, Orin kills Adam. They return home to gleefully break the news to Christine, and Orin, who has had an Oedipus complex all his life, kills her too.


The third play is 'The Haunted'. Vinnie and Orin are living together at the family mansion. There is gossip in the village about the sudden deaths of their parents, but locals maintain the Mannons have always been unlucky and console themselves with the notion that there is always payback for wealth and privilege. Vinnie is planning to marry her longstanding beau Peter Niles; Orin is supposed to marry Peter's sister Hazel. But Orin is haunted, not by guilt (he is proud of safeguarding the family reputation) but by the thought of losing Vinnie, whom he is now unnaturally attached to. Vinnie promises to forget Peter and stay with Orin forever, if only he will stop writing his account of what happened to their parents. Satisfied, Orin kills himself. The play and the trilogy ends with Hazel persuading Vinnie not to marry Peter because she's ruining him, and Vinnie resolving perforce to keep her promise to Orin.

I'm not going the way Mother and Orin went. That's escaping punishment. And there's no one left to punish me. I'm the last Mannon. I've got to punish myself! Living alone here with the dead is a worse act of justice than death or prison! I'll never go out or see anyone! I'll have the shutters nailed close so no sunlight can ever get in. I'll live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let die!"

The exclamation marks speak for themselves. There are hundreds of them across the three plays in thirteen acts. They suggest, I believe rightly, that this borders on expressionism, which would have been heightened by the implied use of masks - the Mannons are always described as having faces like masks. For example Lavinia:

Above all, one is struck by the same, life-like mask impression [like her mother Christine] her face gives in repose.

Masks is one of the elements O'Neill took from the drama of ancient Athens. The other is the chorus - made up of various gossiping locals under the leadership  of the koryphiaos, the Mannon handyman Seth Beckwith. I'm not sure O'Neill really got the purpose of the Greek chorus, which was to provide the main characters with insight into their actions. Here they just gawk and gossip and provide much needed comic relief.


O'Neill also to an extent mirrors Greek staging. There is a dwelling - the Mannon house - and we can be either inside or outside. There are various rooms we can visit when we are indoors. He cannot help but break away in the later part of 'The Hunted' though. He takes us to a wharf in Boston and Brant's ship, of which we can see the quayside, the deck (from which Adam conducts an exchange with the Chantyman, a stand-in chorus-leader, who might well be played by the same actor who usually plays Seth), and Adam's cabin within, where he and Christine plan their elopement while Orin and Vinnie listen in from above on the deck. Were this performed in a Greek amphitheatre it is easy to see how this could be accommodated on the platform stage with the single structure on it - but I would love to see it done as described by O'Neill here.


O'Neill, like Bernard Shaw, provides novelistic description. There can be no question it makes the scripts easier to read. For me as a multi-graduate in drama it's a problem because I'm always thinking how could this be done in reality?


I had a whale of a time reading it though. It's fantastic stuff - such ambition, such dramatic skill, such characters - I'm almost tempted to add an exclamation mark of my own. I wish somebody would put it on today. An American production, perhaps, touring to the National or Stratford? Now, where did I put my copy of Strange Interlude?


This by the way is edition you want if you can get it. This Cape paperback reproduces the text as they first published it in 1966 and it might even be a reproduction of the 1932 original. No guff, no notes, just a master and his masterpiece.