King’s
Theatre, Edinburgh
Three
stars
The
shadow of St Paul’s hangs over a war-torn London throughout this revival of
Hattie Naylor’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’ brooding novel of overlapping
lives, brought to life for this current tour by the Original Theatre Company
and York Theatre Royal. It’s there in 1947, where the story starts with Phoebe
Pryce’s rudderless former war-time ambulance worker Kay, wandering the bombed-out
London streets in search of old certainties and lost love as the crux of a romantic
triangle with Florence Roberts’ Helen and Izabella Urbanowicz’s Julia. It’s
there too as Waters’ story rewinds, first to 1944, then to 1941, both less
indifferent times that show how Helen ended up running a dating agency for
those attempting to get back to how things were. That was before the first
excited flush of her affair with Julia left her in a similar state of decline.
Everybody
is bereft in the first half of Alastair Whatley’s production, with both Helen’s
assistant Viv and Viv’s brother Duncan attempting to find some kind of
salvation by holding on to the past. As they cling to each other for dear life in
the emotional crossfire, like St Paul’s, they survive. Like the blitzed houses
they once occupied, however, they are empty shells, sleep-walking their way
through loveless half-lives in the rubble.
A
slow-burning sense of sadness permeates the world conjured up by David Woodhead’s
set and the midnight blues of Nic Farman’s lighting, with Whatley’s cast of
eight woozily pulsed along by Sophie Cotton’s stately score. Through the slow
unfurling of fractured lives, we see the damage inflicted on a generation whose
accidental flight into personal liberation as much as something greater ends up
leaving them with nothing once they come blinking into the light. If things don’t
always catch fire here, Naylor’s reimagining of Waters’ story nevertheless lays
bare the need to find a reason to live throughout dark times.
The Herald, October 17th 2019
ends
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