Ah, exam season! Now the self-satisfied relaxation of the revision weeks quietly makes way for stress and bitter regret; now May Dip is fading softly into vague recollection along with everything you studied during the semester, and there is no longer any excuse to not be locked in (except for a brilliantly fun Barron show, the last bit of student theatre of the year!). Now is the time to maintain a delicate balance (haha) between work and rest, to ensure that you take ample breaks (such as to watch an exciting show in the Barron) but to spend every other second studying, and certainly not to spend your entire night on a theatre review when you have 7000 unwritten words due in next week. But as this play shows us, delicate balances aren’t easy to maintain, and it’s much more liberating to just break them and give up (not actual advice). But what a masterpiece of a show it is! 3 (yes, three) hours (two intervals) that will make you forget your exams and responsibilities and absorb you completely in its own (possibly) even more doomed world, and an exquisite showcase of 6 of the most brilliant actors in St Andrews.
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ID: Orsolya Haynes, Keenan Parker, Lila Ahnger, Rupert Carter, and Buster Ratcliffe van der Geest.
Credit: Ryan Cunningham |
A delicate balance, or rather a tense equilibrium, is apparent immediately in the relationship between Orsolya Haynes’ poised and dictatorial Agnes and Buster Ratcliffe van der Geest’s scattered, vaguely opinionated Tobias – but there’s much more going on here than a stereotypical battle between tyrannical wife and bemused husband. They're really quite old and over their long marriage have established, or fallen into, an inescapable routine of mundane daily life. They have been frozen in time for perhaps 40 years, and have at some point realised that they are deeply unhappy; that the people they spend their time with are the only people they have, and all they do in life is all that there is to their lives; and perhaps that they wanted more out of life – but they are trapped by propriety or apathy, and do not believe they can change now. The titular delicate balance is of course multiple, and could be the balance of a marriage, of a household, of society, or of a mind. Everyone in this play is unstable, and too proud to admit it, and pridefully attempt to assert their own vision of how life should be. They are all really childish, even though they are all very grown up.
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ID: Buster seated and Orsi standing.
Credit: Ryan Cunningham. |
Orsi is always prim and poised, sitting and judging everyone against her absolute beliefs of the proper order of things, but it’s clear from the first of her many intensely evocative, image-rich hypothetical monologues (to which no-one pays attention), fantasising about going mad while reading
The Decameron (thematically relevant in many ways, such as her thoughts on plagues – but if we stretch it perhaps also hinting at a hidden queer desire?), that she is not a fool, but instead very imaginative and thoughtful – and nonetheless stagnant. She is both fascinated by and terrified of change and ‘becoming a stranger’: her monologues always end in the maintenance of the status quo, and in trying to pin everyone and everything into their proper places, including herself in her place and duties as a wife, at the centre of everything. Orsi plays her has a sharp intensity but also quiet emotional depth, and is intensely moving just by sitting in her usual position on the sofa talking and on the verge of tears.
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| ID: Orsi and Buster seated. Credit: Ryan Cunningham. |
Tobias by comparison is always on the edge of things, always at the drinks trolley or the bookshelf, reacting to and going along with things and trying to avoid any sort of independent action. Buster performs a general befuddlement that is sometimes a reactionary callousness, or often genuinely contemplative, always innocently surprised and taking everything seriously, continually stammering and hesitating and trying to grasp at some higher meaning or moral conclusion or just to find the right words, and always failing, always ending up in the mundane or in silence, and going to pour another drink. He is mostly useless, the archetypally helpless heterosexual male who never tried hard enough, and can’t even fully grasp his own failure – nevertheless he is charming, and funny. Beneath his surface-level tolerance of everything is a complete bafflement about how to be happy, and a helpless or hypocritical desire for the continuation of the stagnant unhappy order of his life, with its accompanying illusion of peace, that makes him quickly turn to furious absolutism. His final monologue is a virtuosic display of emotional range, manically smiling while channelling extreme rage and horror and despair, and desperately, brokenly begging for a sort of absolution.
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| ID: Keenan and Buster seated. Credit: Ryan Cunningham. |
Keenan Parker’s Claire is the initial pressure on Agnes' and Tobias' fragile marriage, perpetually in motion, undeniably charming, and endlessly funny. Removed by power of her (wilful! controlled! intentional!) alcoholism from the societal pressures and responsibilities the others feel, she lives to perform her own detachment and freedom, to provoke her sister Agnes, and to laugh at the secrets and hypocrisies she sees in others and the world. She moves in grand attention-grabbing poses, giggles performatively or reflexively, plays the accordion, and continually switches facial expressions, inquiring, then mock-surprised, then bored, then smiling widely and ironically: she is, obviously, a joy to watch. She seems at first to do all this entirely for her own enjoyment, but even in the fortified world of pure mockery she has built for herself – the only full rejection we see of the ossified heterosexual marital order – she is stuck, and yearns for something more or different, based on ideals of love and truth.
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ID: Hannah Glen curled up.
Credit: Ryan Cunningham. |
Lila Ahnger’s Edna and Rupert Carter’s Harry are dark mirrors of the central couple (though perhaps everyone in this show is in some aspect a dark mirror of everyone else), and comedic powerhouses, suddenly appearing having fled ‘the Terror’, and bringing with them a surreal childishness and fake performance of courtesy (endless false laughter), working to expose not only the failures of conventional married life but also every characters’ understandings of normalcy. Rupert potters around absolutely innocently, endlessly digresses and restarts his sentences, and consumes indescribable quantities of alcohol. He is completely childish and unforfending, and then suddenly out of nowhere absolute existential terror will break across his face. Lila at first innocently echoes the ends of his lines, but soon reveals herself to be self-aware and manipulative, even vindictive, pushing everyone to breaking point through her distortions of the polite status quo to work out what’s underneath; she switches instantly between fear and cold authority. Hannah Glen’s Julia is even more extreme, returning home after the collapse of her 4th marriage vibrating with pure fury and outrage, staring with frightening intensity at her enemies or just into the middle distance, chewing her thumb, and simultaneously absolutely sensitive, endlessly patronised but seeking the stability and safety of her childhood and unable to cope with its destruction, and absolutely adoring Claire (who couldn’t care less about her – potential ship ruined) or Claire’s seeming freedom.
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| ID: Keenan leaning over a seated Buster. Credit: Ryan Cunningham. |
Special mention must be given to the set, which includes a bookshelf and small side table taken from my house (being, therefore, the best of all possible bookshelves and small side tables) (I should clarify I have no actual involvement with this production). There are also two armchairs and a sofa and a slightly larger table, arranged in a trapezium to enable perfect triptychs and of the different emotional states warring cast, scattered all over by Roseanna McNaught-Davis with newspapers and books and Vogue magazines, and genuinely nice light-up prop cigarettes. To one side is a very heavily-laden drinks trolley, used to escape conversations and to pour out the endless quantities of alcohol precisely imbibed during the show. Ona Wright and Lila Patterson’s costumes are consistently excellent; conveying character and setting but also independently beautiful – some personal highlights are Buster’s pinstripe suit, Lila (Ahnger)’s commanding deep red skirt suit, Keenan’s jeans, Keenan’s loose white nightgown opposed to Orsi’s put-together white pyjamas and dressing gown and embroidered slippers, Orsi’s heels (about which I have already written at length in other theatre reviews) and Lila’s equally extreme white and red heels. Chase Hornstein’s lights and Maggie Madden and Anoushka Paymaster Thatcher’s sound also enhance everything going on – there’s something I just can’t help but love about the intense blue shadows created by layering blue light onto a normal wash.
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ID: Buster's arm lighting Keenan's cigarette.
Credit: Ryan Cunningham. |
For an American play the sentiments and tensions here are all feel very British and familiar – what Americanisms there are simply add to the comedy by having Keenan move briefly into an exaggerated Southern American accent. For a play about being old and struggling to come to terms with that, it’s also surprising that it’s put on so successfully and movingly by a bunch of university students, for a bunch of university students. Perhaps this can be credited to Poppy Kimitris’ direction as well as to the exceptional actors. There is always more going on than can possibly be looked at by any one person at any one time. Heightened realist comedies of manners like this are a very St Andrews genre of play to put on, and normally I find them pretty boring, but this extremely refined production manages to find and strike the correct delicate balance to be simultaneously funny and intense, and sympathetic and moving. You almost forget everyone is straight (except when they're talking about all the bad sex they aren't having anymore)!
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