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Categories Reviews Trelawny of the Wells

Trelawny of the Wells at the National Theatre – Review

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By Sheridan Morley | February 24, 1993 | International Herald Tribune

“Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ ” is one of those scripts that everyone hates except the public, and the actors who get to play it. After a 30-year absence from London, Pinero’s epitaph for the old actor-laddies has turned up twice, just before Christmas in a patchy all-star West End revival sadly lacking much direction, and now in a vastly better John Caird production for the open Olivier stage of the National.

The mystery, though, is why he didn’t go for the musical; Caird at his best (“Les Misérables”)and his worst (“Children of Eden”) is a director who, like his old partner Trevor Nunn, knows a very great deal about how to give classical dignity to song-and-dance shows.

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Categories Blood Wedding Reviews

Blood Wedding at the National Theatre – Review

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Helen McCrory’s Bride is a tangle of anguish

by Ian Shuttleworth | December 17, 1991 | City Limits Magazine

Cuba, on a set that could have been designed by a Catalan, Salvador Dalí: a cross stands above a flimsy veil of drapery, lilies thrust through oil drums. It gives visual form to the verdure of Lorca’s poetry, in a production which elsewhere drifts in and out of focus with the cast’s bludgeoningly rolled Hispanic Rs. The bride and her family are white… not white trash exactly, but poorer than the groom’s folk. Having chosen to use such a device rather than fully integrating the casting, director Yvonne Brewster says nothing with it; it doesn’t even seem a pointed un-statement.

Helen McCrory’s Bride is a tangle of anguish: she knowingly runs off with her former lover after her wedding, but can truthfully say, “I didn’t want to.” After husband and lover have killed each other, the typically Lorquista outburst of keening women (rural Spain showing kinship with rural Ireland) ends with a gratuitous labour spasm from the lover’s widow. Brewster strives for resonance, but neglects to supply solid surfaces for her production to reverberate against.