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.

Original Sin - Peter Gill

 Having rediscovered the work of Peter Gill, who was big when I was a drama student first time round, with The York Realist, reviewed below, I was keen to read more.   I picked up Original Sin, first produced at the Sheffield Crucible in May 2002.   This is, in fact, the edition published to accompany the premiere.

Original Sin is Gill's take on Frank Wedekind's Pandora plays, Pandora's Box and Earth Spirit, which I had tried to find when I was originally a drama student and couldn't find.  I still haven't read them but they are now on my must-read lisr.

Pandora, of course, is famously Louise Brooks in the Pabst movie.   Gill shifts the timeframe back to the era of Oscar Wilde.   Gill's object of desire is Angel, who has risen from the gutter to be the adored idol of society.   He has been raised by newspaper magnate Lionel Southerdown and is now being painted by society artist Eugene Black.  From there, everything falls down.   Black kills himself for love of Angel and Southerdown manipulates Angel into shooting and killing him.

Angel flees to France with his adopted brother, Henry Southerdown, now his lover.   Henry is ruined in a Stock Exchange scandal and Angel ends up touting for trade in a Whitechapel slum, where he shares the ultimate, gruesome fate of Wedekind's Pandora.

Gill's play is epic in length, scope and achievement.   Everyone around Angel is motivated by sex and money, yet Gill is such an expert in characterisation that Angel is absolutely no angel.   I kind of always knew his ultimate fate (I might not have read Wedekind's original but I have read a good deal about it) but was intrigued to discover how it came about.   That's the whole point.

I was impressed by The York Realisr.   I was extremely impressed with Original Sin.

The York Realist - Peter Gill

 Another playscript, this time by writer-director Peter Gill, perhaps best known for staging the plays of D H Lawrence in the Seventies.   The play, originally mounted in 2001 and revived inb 2018, is about a farm worker, George, who is put forward for and gets a part in an amateur production of the York Mystery plays.   He falls for the assistant director, John, who wants George to try turning professional, but George won't leave his mother and family and the farm.   So they continue a secret relationship for several years until John returns to attend Mother's funeral.

It is all expertly done.   The supporting characters are vividly drawn, as is the harsh reality of life on the lowest rung of the agricultural ladder.   The trap George finds himself in is evoked particularly in the character of his brother-in-law Arthur, who has escaped it.   The relationship between George and John is delicately done, but what makes the play stand out is Gill's technique for handling time and memory.   The audience - or in my case the reader - has to pay that bit of extra attention which inevitably makes engagement to a deeper level.

Gill uses the same technique in the two linked plays, The Look Across the Eyes and Lovely Evening, which accompany The York Realist in this 2018 edition.   These are set in Cardiff, where Gill was brought up, in the late Forties and early Fifties (Gill was born in 1939).   They focus on the household of May and Harry, before and after May's death.   In the first play their oldest son Laurence, who is also our narrator, is sixteen.   Laurence the narrator, though, is in his thirties; in both plays, therefore, he is looking back.   In The Look Across the Eyes, May's single brother Jimmy - a docker like Harry - is invited to move in.   He is still there, a permanent fixture with the widower Harry and the adult Laurence.   In Lovely Evening Laurence has taken on May;s household duties, looking after the two ageing brothers-in-law who go about their mysterious and separate evening activities.

So that's three slice-of-life working class dramas in a style I find increasingly appealing.   Gill is a very fine playwright and I'm keen to get hold of more of his published scripts.