Tag Archives: Polly Teale

Mine – November 2008

6/10

By Polly Teale

Directed by Polly Teale

Shared Experience

Minerva Theatre

Saturday 8th November 2008

This is one of those plays that probably only a woman could write. It’s very focused on motherhood, and the awkward relationships between not only mothers and daughters, but also a birth mother and an adoptive one. It’s quite nice, after a lot of Shakespeare, to see a play about the one thing he just didn’t do – mothers and daughters.

The set was interesting. The back wall comprised a series of sliding panels, all silvery-grey, which served as a projection screen as well as various doors. There was another door to the far left, and the only furniture at the start was a doll’s house about three or four feet high to our left, and a modern chair and table to our right. There were other chairs brought on as needed, and the second half started with lots of boxes on the stage and the furniture overturned, which the cast sorted out in the early stages, removing the boxes and righting the furniture. They also started packing up the doll’s house before moving it back from our right to its original position.

The back panels had an image of the lighted windows of a high rise apartment block projected onto them early on, to set the scene. The image also reminded me of DNA results, the little blobs that descend down the page. These were across the way, but even so the connection was there for me, and I was reminded of it occasionally during the play. Otherwise, the screen was mainly used for images of a young girl, at play or whatever, to add an extra layer to the action or between the scenes.

We also saw a young girl wandering about (Sophie Stone) in a white dress, and carrying a doll or teddy. She played with the doll’s house, and even talked with the woman (Katy Stephens). The woman was a high-powered business type who seemed to be organising some event or project, almost impervious to outside concerns. Her partner (Alistair Petrie) tells her they’ve got an appointment somewhere the next day, and she starts planning some major changes, cancelling work, etc. It turns out that a young baby, whose mother is a drug addict, is available for them to foster, and if the mother drops out of rehab they’ll be able to keep her. The play follows the process of the handover and the woman’s need to keep a connection going with the birth mother, which her partner finds disturbingly obsessive. The woman goes as far as taking the baby to the birth mother, Rose (Lorraine Stanley) while she’s actually on the job (touting for customers), and the final resolution comes out of that episode.

I found it a moving play, though not in the early stages when the scenes were a bit too choppy and clinical to engage me emotionally. It was in the woman’s relationships with her own family, a sister (Clare Lawrence Moody) and mother (Marion Bailey) that the play came alive, while her insistent desire to find Rose after she’d left rehab was both disturbing and understandable. Disturbing because of the areas of life she and we had to look at – the drug taking, sexual abuse and prostitution – and understandable because she instinctively knew that the baby was going to need that connection to her birth mother some day, and that that relationship had to be acknowledged as part of her life for her to be happy and at peace. Or that’s how I saw it anyway.

I realised early on that the girl in the white dress could be a number of things. She could be the woman herself as a child, or the ideal child that she was fantasising about, but on the whole I think she represented the spirit of the child that the baby would grow up to be. The woman had a number of conversations with her, as well as having dreams which included her, such as playing a game of hide and seek which ended up with the girl hiding in the doll’s house, and then being sealed up in it (the start of the second half). In fact, the whole play had a kind of dreamy quality to it, with the action shifting from ‘reality’ to the imagination all the time, and often these levels were going on simultaneously. On one occasion Rose appeared, and took the baby from the woman, carrying her over to the sister when she arrived, then walking off at the back. I assume that was symbolic, though I’ve no idea of what.

The sister was the one who had children of her own, and who felt less valuable because she didn’t have an important career. But unlike the woman, she did have experience in bringing up children, which the woman thought was the most important thing. Clare Lawrence Moody also played Katya, the home help, who added a touch of humour to proceedings with her no-nonsense approach to child rearing. The mother was the controlling sort, and the woman had felt under tremendous pressure to make something of her life. Now she wanted a child, and didn’t want her mother watching her every move and criticising her. The mother certainly wanted to be involved, even to the extent of waiting outside their house in her car for hours, trying to get the woman on the phone.

The partner is the only representative of the male half of the world’s population, and it’s fair to say that he doesn’t get much of a look in. He does have some good arguments, and a short piece about how he feels, but he’s mainly there to show us the completely rational point of view, and this play makes it clear that there’s more to life than that. There’s a different perspective, a sense of the connections between people, which don’t always operate in a logical, rational way. The woman feels this, and responds to it as best she can, and I could relate to that, while his pleasure that Rose has left rehab, so that they can keep the baby, is quite repulsive; even though it’s understandable, it was played to be unsympathetic. The playing of Rose was important in this respect. We can see what kind of life she leads, and yet she has that connection with her baby, and for a while she seems to want to change her life to be able to keep that connection going. I couldn’t judge her, as she was having a tough time just living.

The play also looks at the way so many busy working women are trying to fit babies into their lives, and aren’t always able to adjust. This woman has a lifestyle that’s beyond hectic, yet she wants a child as well. We see her trying to ignore the baby while trying to get her work done, and having difficulty knowing what to do when the baby won’t stop crying. This sounds like typical drama fodder, but there’s a sense that something isn’t right, that the woman is missing something. Katy Stephens started off playing her very calm, almost too calm and controlled, but as we see her with her mother and sister, we find out more about her emotional life, and Katy is able to express more of the power we saw on stage during the Histories.

It’s a challenging piece, and not to everyone’s taste, I’m sure, but I enjoyed it, and never felt bored, though as I say it did take some time for me to feel involved. I liked the use of imagery, and the performances were all fine. We applauded for quite some time after the cast had gone, but they didn’t come back for another bow, sadly. Steve reckoned there was some kind of supporters’ do that night, so they had to be quick.

© 2008 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me

Kindertransport – March 2007

8/10

By: Diane Samuels

Directed by: Polly Teale

Company: Shared Experience

Venue: Yvonne Arnaud Theatre

Date: Friday 2nd March 2007

This was a very moving play, with a surprising amount of humour. It’s based on the experiences of the Jewish children who were sent away from Germany just before WWII, to England, many of whom never saw their families again. This play focuses on one child, Eva, who, at nine years old is sent away to England by her parents. She is taken in by a family in Manchester, grows up there, and eventually rejects her original family to maintain her Englishness. We see the story both in the past, reliving Eva’s journey and experiences, and also in the present, as Evelyn (her new name) tries to keep her previous life a secret from her teenage daughter. Her daughter is persistent, however, and with the help of her grandmother, the woman who took Eva in all those years ago, a truth of a sort emerges. Throughout all of this, there is the figure of the Ratcatcher, as in the Pied Piper, a story told to Eva as a child, and which should serve as a dire warning never to tell children scary stories. Eva is terrified of this figure when it’s just a story, but when it takes on flesh and blood through Nazi persecution, her terror is multiplied, and affects her life and the way she relates to others profoundly. Hence her daughter’s insistence on knowing about her mother’s past – she knows there’s something missing, and she’s appalled that her mother could wilfully keep it from her, when it’s part of who she is as well. Of course, to her mother it represents all her fears, so she doesn’t want to face it, but through this confrontation, she seems to come to a gradual acceptance of her past, even if it’s not all forgiven and forgotten.

The whole production of this play was excellent. All the performances were perfect, and the interweaving of the stories and the time elements was masterful. We were shown so much about human suffering, and courage and compassion, that I was moved to tears. I wasn’t sure about the Ratcatcher at first – he just seemed to collapse onto the stage and crawl around for a while, but eventually the symbolism took hold, and Evelyn’s final identification of the Ratcatcher with her mother was very powerful. I increasingly saw the Ratcatcher as more of a victim than a figure of terror, as the character’s make up and behaviour became more tortured. And I particularly liked the way I could feel sympathy for the various points of view and the choices which had been made, without judging or supporting any specific person. All the women were tremendously strong characters, and showed great courage in the face of their difficulties. It was also nice to see a genuinely kind mother figure for once, in the shape of the Mancunian woman who takes Eva in and supports her with an amazing degree of understanding throughout her life in England.

The set was very evocative. It was a large attic space, with lots of “storage solutions” as they’re called nowadays – several wardrobes, chests of drawers, trunks and boxes lined the space, and various items of bric-a-brac were scattered around or piled in a corner. There was also a ladder resting on a cam ceiling, which was used to get Eva on and off her ship to England. Wardrobe doors doubled as room doors, and Eva did a fair bit of climbing over the furniture and boxes – good for showing us the scene settings, and also evoking the natural way children behave.

The one man in the cast played several parts. Apart from the Ratcatcher, he was also a German official on the train taking the children to the boat, who stole Eva’s money, but let her keep her mouth-organ, as well as giving her a sweetie – he thought he was being so good! He returned as a postman who delivers Eva’s Ratcatcher book from her mother, when they could still get post through, and who jokes with her about the Nazi salute. And he’s also an unpleasant railway guard who intimidates Eva when she’s waiting for her parents to arrive – they almost made it, but war broke out a few days too soon.

Eva’s rejection of her natural mother after the war was a very moving scene. I could see both points of view – her mother has never stopped loving her, and still sees Eva as her daughter, with the other mother just a temporary relationship, as if Eva had simply been a lodger. Eva/Evelyn, on the other hand, has built a life for herself, has been through untold suffering, trying to get her parents the papers they need to get out of Germany and join her, and now she’s not the little girl who left her mother before the war. Even then, her mother had been pushing her to do things for herself, and to stand on her own feet. Now she’s doing it, and both of them are suffering.

© 2007 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me