Narayani Menon comes over all teary-eyed watching Sonnets for an Old Century…
royal court? | near faultless | passion and intensity

Royal Court?
If Durham Student Theatre were the London theatre scene, I have a conviction that the Bailey Theatre Company would be the Royal Court. It’s that mix of solid fare and experimental forays – and it’s their dabbling in the more experimental side of student theatre that drew me to their production of Jose Rivera‘s Sonnets for an Old Century. Knowing nothing about the play, I was intrigued to see what Rivera, who wrote the screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries, could bring to the stage.

In fact, the most disappointing part of the evening was the script. Although it was beautifully written – two hours of monologued vignettes from various characters in a purgatory abstracted from contemporary America – there didn’t seem to be any real overall point to the script. This was all the more frustrating because of the gorgeous lyricism of the writing itself – but by the end I have no idea what I was supposed to have got out of the show, but I honestly don’t think that was the fault of the production team. One element that could have been changed, however, was certain aspects of the script. Only one of the actors (Sarah Holden-Boyd) spoke with an American (or was it Canadian?) accent, apart from a somewhat baffling foray into Latino-American accent towards the end for Nick Robson‘s final speech – which suggested that perhaps there could have been US accents all the way through. Nevertheless, I felt that some of the colloquialisms which do not translate well into an English accent could have been changed – ‘real’ instead of ‘really’ simply showed up the distance between actor and script. If that was retained intentionally for some Brechtian aspect, fair enough; but it seemed to me merely distracting.

Near faultless
I have a soft spot for Leech Hall, the venue at St John’s College, because it’s such an adaptable space to use, as was demonstrated with last year’s beautifully designed Tempest. We weren’t disappointed this time, walking into a room covered on all sides by laundry, hung on chairs, clothes horses and strung up on clothes lines around the audience. The lighting was a blemish on the overall design concept, however; the actors, lit almost entirely from behind the audience, generally suffered from flattened faces and could have benefited from some side lanterns to add texture. The fact that the audience was semi-lit was a nice touch, though, and contributed to the studio-like feel of the performance (and is probably another factor in my Royal Court theory). The scattered clothing was a brilliantly clever touch, giving the three actors a practical means of changing into the countless characters they played throughout the show, subtly communicating the ‘airing one’s dirty laundry’ message of the play, and making the audience feel as though it actually was surrounded by many different characters.

The acting, for most of the show, was near faultless. It’s not often you hear that – there’s usually a weak link somewhere – but Andrew Goy, Nick Robson, and Sarah Holden-Boyd were all extremely capable and, for the most part, well-suited to their roles. The difficulty with a play requiring that so many parts be played is that not every monologue is going to be perfectly cast. However, when the casting worked, it was quite devastatingly affecting. Notable was Nick Robson‘s electrifying opening speech; pins dropping would have echoed for miles around. Moments of heartbreaking sadness, like Holden-Boyd‘s quite shocking recounting of being beaten up at school, were perfectly juxtaposed with the slowly-revealed hilarity of Goy‘s Icarian prison-break. What most impressed me was the attention to detail paid to the ebbs and flows of dramatic tension. The mesmerising movement of Holden-Boyd‘s cosmic dancer speech was, in many ways, just as dynamic as Robson‘s wonderfully intense speech about his wife. In both, the tension in the audience was palpable. To be honest, I would love to detail every high point in the acting of this production, but it would go on for far, far too long.

Passion and intensity
In his directorial incarnation, Andrew Goy‘s overall concept was slick and intelligent. Programmes were handed out to the audience tacked together with clothes pegs, each comprising a sonnet (of varying quality) and the pseudo-eulogy of one cast member. The fact that each audience member had a different introduction to the show was an interesting choice, nicely acknowledging and augmenting the individuality of each person’s experience. The main problem with the show was, as stated earlier, the conceptual weaknesses of the script – it never quite felt like the characters’ stories had enough of a common denominator to warrant being spliced together. Also somewhat disappointing were many of the endings of individual monologues; all too often these felt anticlimactic and undecided, as though their point was not quite clear. However, the passion and intensity of the performances on the whole balanced this out, to being a production no Royal Court director would be ashamed to call his own.