2nd August: Machinal

  

Before addressing August, please note:

The September Meeting will be held on Wednesday 30th August!

 

I hope that some of you will be back from your holidays by then!

August: Machinal by Sophie Treadwell

 

Another of my National Theatre purchases, and a slightly 'different' play.  It successfully ran in Broadway in 1928 with Clark Gable as 'The Lover'.  It arrived in London two years later, provoked a sensation in Moscow in 1933 and then forgotten until revived in New York and London in the 1990s.

 

"This is a play written in anger.  In the dead wasteland of male society - it seems to ask - isn't it necessary for certain women, at least, to resort to murder?" Nicholas Wright

The Plot:  The story of a young woman who murders her husband.  An ordinary woman.  Any woman.

The Plan:  The story is shown by showing the different phases of life that the woman goes through, none of which bring her any peace.  She is soft and tender.  Life around her is hard and mechanical.  The story is told by voices around her.   The play is named after the French word for mechanical.

Let's see how we get on!

Sophie Treadwell

 

Sophie Treadwell was a campaigning journalist in America between the wars. She covered the sensational murder case involving Ruth Snyder, who with her lover, Judd Gray, had murdered her husband and gone to the electric chair.  From this Machinal, a powerful expressionist drama about the dependent status of women and the living hell of a loveless marriage, was born.

 

 

Thursday 29 June - Please Note Change of Date! Ladies Day by Amanda Whittington

 Things have not been going quite  to plan!

I apologise that this year's play readings have not been keeping to schedule, I shall try to do better for the rest of the year!

Last month we finally read Kerry Jackson, and I think it's fair to say that we were not entirely enthusiastic about it in our discussion at the end.  However, the ECC gave it a much warmer welcome!  Perhaps because I gave it such a bad review before we started!

Unfortunately I have messed up with July!  And so we will meet the week before, but on the THURSDAY - 29TH JUNE.

 

Ladies Day

by Amanda Whittington

Life is one long, hard slog for the fish-filleting foursome Pearl, Jan, Shelley and Linda. But their fortunes are set to change when they head to Ladies Day at the races. Factory hairnets make way for fascinators as the four friends hit the races for an unforgettable day out.

Secrets are spilled with the champagne and friendships are tested to the limit. Yet as the day unfolds and tempers fray, their accumulator bet keeps quietly winning. If their luck and their nerve holds, the ladies could could hit the jackpot – and more.

 

This play is consistently in Nick Hern Book’s Top Ten Most Performed Plays and enjoys hundreds of amateur productions across the UK.  It has been produced as a play for Radio 4.

 

I do hope we like it, not least because I have bought many scripts based on the Nick Hern 2023 list! 

8 March - Kerry Jackson - PLEASE NOTE, 2ND WEEK OF MONTH

 

FIRSTLY A REMINDER:

No Play Reading in April and May

We will resume as normal on  7th June

 

Kerry Jackson by April de Angelis

I have this conviction that I read a good review in The Guardian of Kerry Jackson, but when I went to find it for this blog it turns out  they gave it just one star!  A search of the internet revealed some more pretty damning reviews!  Oh dear!  What have I done?!

I did, however, find this on the little known (to me anyway) website www.cityam.com.  

Amid the deafening noise of the culture wars, when everyone’s trying to shout the loudest to get their point across, we need shows like Kerry Jackson. A new piece by April De Angelis, it employs an almost perplexingly simple set up to show how easily we forget to look for the empathy in one another.

Kerry Jackson is 52, working class, and has lived in London all her life. She’s just opened her new business, a Spanish tapas restaurant, and she’s a ball of energy – but it’s not long before she starts dishing out opinions about everyone from the local homeless guy to who should and shouldn’t be allowed into the country. She has a poisonous tongue, but would probably be good fun on a night out.

Then there is Stephen, played by Michael Gould, a mild-mannered, middle class visitor who gets wrapped up in Kerry’s restaurant life and also in-between her sheets.

With a small cast, their pairing feels predictable, but the rest is surprising and sensational: De Angelis writes convincingly from both perspectives as the couple joust over just about everything, displaying their polarised attitudes, and there’s a shocking culmination that gives Ibsen a run for his money. 

The script is basically the story of Kerry getting schooled by a posh bloke but De Angelis shows how he’s as broken as she is. “That’s the first time you’ve told the truth,” Jackson barks at him – correctly – after he erupts at her one night, exploding any presumption that his middle class status gives him a moral highground.

It’s all devastatingly convincing, forcing us to look inward at our own prejudices. In particular, Fay Ripley’s studied performance as Kerry Jackson feels like an homage to working class London women. Jackson feels real, like she’s been plucked off the street. Ripley is hilarious but she gets at every part of this woman: she nails her defensiveness, her gestures, her feline walk and how her voice morphs, words sometimes flying like poison darts, at others with an inquiring softness. 

She’s dressed to look the part by Richard Kent, and there’s clever juxtaposition in the staging, especially when a homeless guy called Will, brought to life by Michael Fox, is shown cowering outside on the streets, inches from where the two of them are discussing his fate as if it were literal dinnertime entertainment. 

It’s disarmingly simple: how De Angelis calls her show Kerry Jackson, how the poster is a picture of Kerry Jackson – it’s so straightforward that it shouldn’t work. But De Angelis and Ripley have turned out to be a ferocious female power team. More, please.

I think we'll just have to read it and make up our own minds!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 February: Middle

Middle is the second in David Eldridge's as yet unfinished trilogy exploring love and relationships.

In Beginning we met Laura and Danny, at the very start of their relationship.

Middle introduces us to Maggie and Gary, in their 50s, parents and married over 12 years.  Should they have an honest conversation about life and marriage? Can their marriage stand it?

Raw. Touching. Funny. Real.

4 January 2023: The Unfriend

Happy New Year All

After the nasty little bug I caught in December, we are shifting the plays back a month, and so we start 2023 with The Unfriend

It is by Steven Moffat who is, depending on your viewing habits, a familiar name from the writing credits of Dr. Who, Sherlock or the film Tintin!  The London production got a 4* review in The Guardian, so I'm optimistic!

It is almost certainly the most modern play we have read!  Here's the Wikipedia entry:

"The play was due to premiere at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester as part of the 2020 Festival, however due to the COVID-19 pandemic the play was postponed to 2022. The play began previews on 21 May 2022, with a press night on 26 May. It ended its planned limited run on 9 July 2022. The play is directed by Mark Gatiss (in his directorial debut) ... The Unfriend will transfer to the West End, opening at the Criterion Theatre on 19 January 2023, following previews from 15 January. It will play a limited run to 16 April 2023, with the original cast from Chichester all returning."

So if you enjoy it you might be able to get to see it.  I am already tempted, as Mark Gatiss has had me almost out of my seat weeping with laughter as a performer!

"Ah, but the play Janet!" I hear you cry.

"We're dying of manners. We're under siege from personal embarrassment.  This is not sane.  This is not rational.  That woman is a monster!"

Peter and Debbie are enjoying a cruise, a celebration of twenty years of  marriage, and a break from their annoying teenagers.  They befriend fellow passenger, Elsa Jean Krakowski, an eccentric American with a fondness for Donald Trump.  There's something slightly unsettling in her overeager friendliness, but there's no point rocking the boat if you're about to get off it.

Back home, in the comfort of suburbia, Elsa suddenly turns up on Peter and Debbie's doorstep, unexpectedly.  And when they look up their house guest online, unearthing some hair-raising evidence, their good nature is challenged as never before.  What k ind of danger have they allowed to take up residence in their guest room? And can they bring themselves to say anything about it?  Sometimes the truth is just too impolite.

This is a 'hilarious and satirical' look at middle-class England's disastrous instinct always to appear nice.

9 November: Beginning - PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF DATE

What a lovely group we had last month!  So nice to welcome new and old members!

Because we have been having smaller groups recently on my last trip to London I bought a number of scripts with a smaller cast list!  And I propose to start on one of these new, modern, plays next month.

I will be interested in what  you think of this play. I think we'll read it in one go and have tea and cake after as it's shorter than a normal play.

Beginning  by David Eldridge 

This 2017 play is the first of a trilogy of plays to look at love and relationships, it is followed by Middle, but it seems that End has not yet been written!  Beginning had excellent reviews and transferred to various theatres after its original run at The National.

Set in the aftermath of Laura's housewarming party at her new flat in Crouch End, Danny, having attended simply as the plus one of a friend, is the last remaining guest. Laura is 38, single, childless and with no immediate family; Danny is 42, divorced, living with his mother and has not seen his daughter for a number of years.

The play begins with them nearly kissing and charts their journey in real time as they both seek to get back to that point. While Laura is clear from the outset that she fancies Danny and wants him to stay over, Danny is reluctant to share his true feelings. Over the course of the play, both begin to open up to one another and share their mutual loneliness and isolation in the city of London and where they are in their lives.

7 September: Chez Nous

 Hello and Welcome Back!

I hope you all had a wonderful summer.

To start off the Autumn Term I've found a "domestic comedy" from 1974: Chez Nous by Peter Nichols.  The first cast included Albert Finney, Geraldine McEwan and Denholm Elliott and received excellent reviews.  We might find it a little dated now, but hopefully fun.

In the wake of the publication of his controversial book on adolescent sexuality, Dick and his wife, Liz, have retreated with their family to the French countryside. Joined by their friends Phil and Diana for a child-free weekend, they enjoy the sunshine and the cheap wine until certain unsavoury revelations come to light. At the worst moment possible, two reporters appear to interview Dick, causing great worry among the couples that all their secrets will be aired in the press. Nichols drew inspiration from time spent at his own family's home in France.   

Makes you wonder what his holidays were like!!