1 post tagged “felicity jones”
Have been meaning to write up my thoughts on Polly Stenham's That Face which I saw a couple of weeks back but I've been lazy. And I'm glad I was, because it means I can kill two birds with one stone and comment on last nights The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold too.
Both are about families and it is interesting to see certain parallels even though there is more than 50 years between their creation.
Stenham is the West End's hot new talented playwright. She penned That Face aged only 19 and after a successful debut at the Royal Court Theatre it transferred to the West End.
She's got more writing talent in her little finger than I'll ever have producing such a rounded, well structured and well observed piece at such a tender age but if she is half as talented as this implies then I'm more excited about what is to come.
That Face is the story of a posh middle-class family, fractured by divorce and going into free fall. The mother is a drunken, vallium-popping recluse played with just the right amount of stagger and neurosis by Lindsey Duncan. Her son is trying desperately to straighten her out having dropped out of university to keep an eye on her but has in his immaturity becomes dependent on her neediness.
And the teenage daughter played by Skin's Hannah Murray has just gone a bit wild without the steadying parental influence and at the start of the play is in the process of getting kicked out of her posh school by drugging and torturing a younger pupil as part of a initiation ceremony.
It skips along at a merry pace exposing some foibles and failings in modern western society as kids try to clean up the mother before Dad arrives to cart her off to a clinic. Duncan's is not the only sterling performance in fact the only weakness was Murray who had a tone of voice that just grated after a while and played the neglected spoilt teenager in the stiff-armed gesturing way that seems to have come straight out of drama school.
The ending came all to quick which was a sign of how enjoyable the whole thing was and the same can be said for the Chalk Garden at the Donmar.
Bagnold, who is probably most famous for writing National Velvet, based the idea on her own experience. Once again a dysfunctional family is the central theme this time an eccentric Grandmother who, disapproving of her daughters remarriage has taken her teenage granddaughter in. It is a posh household with an aging, bedridden butler living unseen upstairs but always at the end of the phone voicing opinions, a paranoid man servant who was imprisoned as a consciencious objector during the war and the new Governess who is just quietly strange compared to everyone else.
Naturally the granddaughter is intelligent but completely wild and over indulged. In the story, the Governess has a secret to hide but her presence does more than make the family want to unravel her mystery, it also unearths a few painful truths about their own relationships.
It was refreshing to see a play that had a predominantly maturer cast led by the wickedly funny Margaret Tyzack who plays the Grandmother and Penelope Wilton who plays the Governess. I feel I'm doing a great disservice to Wilton when the one role she's had which I always remember is Sean's mum in Sean of the Dead. She is certainly an actress of far more depth and scope than that performance betrays.
Felicity Jones at 24 plays the 16 daughter and is one of those actresses who'll be pulling off characters 10-15 years her junior for much of her career. I was impressed by her in ITV's Northanger Abbey and had to google her when I got home just to check she really is in her 20's. Having those extra years of experience certainly helped in her performance compared with Murray in That Face but there was still a bit of the stiff-armed, precociousness going on.
The Chalk Garden is clever and brilliantly funny with some great one-liners. Several audience members felt moved enough to utter a very British middle class 'bravo' during the final applause and if I wasn't an oik and under 50, I'd have said 'bravo' too.
