STRANGE how after all the excitements of the fifties, John Osborne,
Angry Young Men, and subsequent post modernism, the revolution seems to
have swung back on itself.
Just now London theatre seems to be in the grip of revival fever.
Priestley, Rattigan, last year, now Rodney Ackland's 1930s The Old
Ladies and, soon to follow, Patrick Hamilton's 1929 thriller, Rope.
Actually, neither Ackland nor Hamilton makes for easy theatregoing. Both
embark on journeys into forbidden, emotional territory for all their
apparent conventional everyday trappings, made all the more disturbing
by their final melodramatic psychological twists. Both, though, are
unfashionably slow to unwind.
In Annie Castledine's Greenwich revival of Ackland's Old Ladies, which
stars Miriam Karlin in the role once taken by Edith Evans, and Faith
Brook and Doreen Mantle as the two other lodgers in Iona McLeish's
wonderfully skeletal crumbling house, it does seem for the first hour
that very little is happening.
Mantle's Lucy Amorest suffers over Brook's May Beringer taking tea,
recalling moments of past happiness. Mantle's Lucy is all comforting
warmth and Christian charity, Brook's May all fluttering, birdlike
terror. Upstairs, Karlin's Agatha in black wig and oriental scarves
glowers and schemes to wrench hold of May's one priceless possession --
a piece of amber given to her by her best friend.
Castledine and her co-director Sean O'Connor choose not to go all out
for Grand Guignol as the play moves towards its cruel climax. Yet, for
all its structural creakiness, Ackland's observation is so acute you
can't help but feel a tug of poignancy as these old ladies creep towards
their various ghostly fates.
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