Reviews
Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter and Samuel Beckett's Footfalls
ACT Autumn production 2018
A review by Helen Mann
In Axbridge Community Theatre's latest production, director Phil Saunders presented a double bill of Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter and Samuel Beckett's Footfall, short works by dramatic giants who were linked by friendship and profound mutual admiration.
On Saturday evening in the High Street a succession of living rooms flickered with lurid colour as competitors strutted, panting and weeping, in Saturday's edition of Strictly Come Dancing. At the theatre, in Beckett's sombre and challenging Footfall, Hannah Strohmeier walked slowly, hypnotically across the tiny stage, dressed in grey, arms clasped across her chest, nine steps one way, nine steps back, measuring out distance and time and silence and one human's capacity to absorb suffering and continue to dream - of something. Behind a screen the voice of an older woman (Janet Gwinn) - was also heard. It was not quite a conversation, more a criss-crossing of interwoven thoughts, across a time-scape of decades. Through their bodies, their voices, their thoughtful weighing of the playwright's words, the actors portrayed what Beckett described in a letter of condolence to a friend in 1960 as 'the strange thing that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds'.
Beckett's most famous work is Waiting for Godot, in which two men wait for two hours in theatre time and forever in real time, for the non-appearance of 'Godot'. In a way all theatre is about waiting. All players, like all people in life, are waiting for something, and Waiting For Godot might equally have been called The Dumb Waiters. Pinter's early stage plays have been described as 'comedies of menace' - and what could be better suited to our present moment, which feels like a protracted comedy of menace, in which we wait for what may or may not happen, the fall out of which we cannot envisage?
In this production, Tony Wilson and Will Vero played two men in a basement room in Birmingham, waiting for the cue to commit an unspecified act of terrible violence. The tension of the previous piece had loosened the audience for laughter and there was lots of it, in response to the comedy of the script and to the actors' knife-edge portrayal of men of violence, bored with waiting but keenly fearful for themselves, terrorised by the small signs of life - deliveries and orders - that arrive from the outer world via a dumb waiter, cleverly constructed by ACT's inventive stage crew.
The sheer glorious hand-madeness of these productions made me feel lucky to live in a time and place such theatre is still possible - and well-attended. Given the choice, on any Saturday night of the year, I would forgo the fluorescent allure of tv and lap up the live, free-range experience of community theatre. In these productions, every audience member was a participant in the drama of humanity. It is a gift from a company to its public, and I'm profoundly grateful to all who took the time and care to prepare it.
A review by Joe Williams
Axbridge Community Theatre (ACT) made two commendably bold choices for their latest evening of productions at the Town Hall. Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls and Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter proved to be a delectable and contrasting pairing of illusory bleakness and slapstick paranoia, chosen and directed by company veteran, Phil Saunders. Beckett’s 1975 masterpiece may not be his best known work, but it is well loved by many of his biggest admirers, and it was a treat to see it performed. There is no doubt that the audience’s enthusiasm for this staging across its run can be credited to a large degree to the performance of its one visible actor, Hannah Strohmeier. A genuine feat of casting in her role as May, she was able to conjure a truly powerful sense of drama from Beckett’s austere script; minute changes in expression throwing the dynamics of the tragedy in wholly new directions; her performance maintaining a tremendous sense of nuance that would wow the even the most critical of theatre goer. The play is short, but its contents are broad and its atmosphere intense. It emerges as if a dream; a woman paces in low lighting; her origins are ambiguous; an unseen mother (whose lines were delivered commendably by Janet Gwinn) the only company she keeps; their conversations stilted and seemingly absurd. From this reverie, May’s life emerges; the curses of her sorrow and sense of duty; her momentary glimpses of a life beyond her role as her mother’s companion; her imprisonment within a moment and within a life. Beckett’s directions are very prescriptive, but there is still a great deal for a director to do – and, given the play’s ambiguity and gentle obtuseness, plenty of scope for him or her to go wrong. Saunders and co, however, got it all just right, evoking a scene of genuine despair and provoking feelings of real sympathy for May and the tragedy of her tired, regretful existence. As it unfolded, I found myself asking “Does she exist at all?” Given how obvious the answer to that question now seems whilst processing what we saw, I think great credit should go to both the play – and this marvellous production.
Although the play that followed was a dramatic change in pace, our perceptions of what is real remained in question, as the true nature of the relationship between two basement room-bound hit men - and of them to the world around them – was built up and then repeatedly undermined. Accidental disclosures, peculiar revelations and the slow divulgement of their backstory were utterly torpedoed by the constant and inexplicable intervention of the play’s eponym. Anyone that saw ACT’s staging of The Ladykillers in 2017 will recall the potent recipe of ne’er-do-wells, slapstick and claustrophobia, and the cocktail was successfully served up again here, supplemented with some fresh ingredients. Central to its accomplishments was the cast: Will Vero and Tony Wilson producing extremely funny performances, that were received with sustained and uproarious laughter. They were a natural pairing and, as ever excellent casting decisions were built upon with great direction and great acting – comedic and other. Though the play is from 1957, it isn’t hard to see it as part of a lineage that forty years later produced Tarantino: the hitmen had suits and holsters, conducting extremely entertaining dialogue that revealed both comradery, distrust, drama and prolonged mundaneness of their professional lives. As the lights dimmed at its end, you couldn’t be sure what had happened. It’s a moment of tension that the company let build very subtlety beneath the humour of the proceeding scenes and comes as a welcome surprise. The run is now over, but whether you managed to see it or not, make a note of ACT’s next production, Time of My Life by Alan Ayckbourn, which will be on between 24 and 27 April 2019, with John Bailey directing.