(seen at the afternoon performance on 16th November 2024)
The World’s Worst English Teacher (WWET) failed to put the monkey off Wesker when she added her special breed of salmonella to “Chicken Soup With Barley.” Fortunately the monkey survived her dose of the squits and discovered the entire trilogy for itself over the next few years.
Easily, this is the most interesting version of the middle play it has seen. Naomi Dawson puts it on a slowly revolving (juddering when it pauses) turntable, a couple of kitchen tables and random chairs, plus a suitcase and toybox about the only props. The revolve may be symbolic, but feels redundant as Diyan Zora’s production runs smoothly enough without it, eschewing an interval to add pace.
It isn’t all plain sailing. Zora needs to take a very long, hard look at the cardboard delivery of the opening scene. Eliot Salt as Jenny Beales sings nicely enough but her interaction with husband Jimmy (Michael Abubakar) feels forced and unnatural.
Fortunately, Morfydd Clark arrives to kick the whole thing up several gears and impress the hell out of the audience. Her Beatie Bryant never forgets her origins, and is a wonderfully unchanged returnee despite having her mind broadened by intellectual London boyfriend Ronnie (whom we met in the last play).
Lee Curran gives her well-constructed spotlight moments in which to expound, but Clark has always the gift of commanding attention without preaching throughout.
Around her, life continues in rural Norfolk. The new piglets need patriarch Mr Bryant’s (Deka Walmsley) supervision - a tremendous performance hinting at a very bleak future. Wife (Sophie Stanton) has family feuds to conduct, and a home to keep on his tiny income. Practical, sensible and open-mined enough to be baffled by her daughter.
It is a mark of different times that a character like Stan Mann (Tony Turner) can be introduced and dropped quickly. Modern playwrights rarely have the luxury of an actor they cannot use once for a short time, but Turner provides far more than just the local alcoholic. He is a symbol of the local philosopher who already knows what the city is thinking without being told.
That is the key to Wesker’s argument, and it is suddenly very topical, politically. In his day it was Marxist ideas on the sharing of “culture capital” as post-war class lines blurred. Simply a case of helping bring what people already knew into focus for them.
Now we are about “populism.” It is clear, comparing this play - particularly in its final scene of homespun preparations made prior to receiving a gift of enlightenment - that the rotten core has simply putrefied further.
Then as now, intellectuals stir up the working classes, then abandon them with weak excuses. In Beattie’s day she bought the idea that raising her consciousness, learning to use “words as bridges” to a new future were going to carry her forward.
This time, how the ruling classes treated the will of the majority over Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, even the restrictions of Covid as they partied... it all amounts to the same thing.
Outstanding ensemble work leading to revelations connecting an early “Angry Young Men” play to the present is good enough for this monkey. It left wondering only why we never get a revival of "I'm Talking About Jerusalem", the last bit of the trilogy.
Perhaps the next to aim for by the Almeida team? The company is assembled, the repertoire system proven. And Beattie can even finish that sponge cake for the first night party... if her father can spare the electricity (another relevant point, now the monkey thinks of it).
4 stars.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner. Used by kind permission of the Almeida Theatre.