Donnchadh O’Conaill reviews Durham University Productions’ first show, Incident at Vichy; Norman Chapel, University College, 8 November 2009

Drama can be ambitious in a number of different ways: the scope of the themes it addresses, the weightiness of the language, the nuance of the characterisation, the rhythm of the unfolding events. Incident at Vichy scores highly on a number of these counts; the decision to present it in the Norman Chapel in University College raised the bar even higher. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, while the production contained a number of successful elements, I felt the piece did not work as a whole.

The play features a great deal of political and ideological chit-chat

The entire play takes place in a makeshift holding cell in Vichy France. A number of suspects are sitting in the room as the audience enters; more are herded in later. They discuss what’s happening and what they ought to do, while officials periodically arrive to take one of them away for questioning and to examine certain parts of their anatomy. Within this simple framework, Incident at Vichy touches on vital themes, and has some extremely powerful exchanges and genuine insights into life under the distorting effects of Nazism (and a suggestion that those effects are not so much distorting as revealing). But as a drama it leaves a lot to be desired. Too much of the play is taken up with characters serving as mouthpieces for ideologies or stances of one sort or another: Marxism, psychoanalysis, bourgeois humanism, and various modes of personal survival. To this can be added an unfortunate tendency of the script to state what would be better left implied, as when the analyst Leduc (Alex Bhat) concluded that the actor Monceau (Adam Usden), though apparently unperturbed by what was happening, was in fact guilty of subconsciously betraying himself to the Nazis. The trouble is that Usden was doing a perfectly good job of getting this subtext across, without needing another character to helpfully point out what was happening.

Lastly, and most importantly, very little dramatic action ever occurs (the play could have been titled ‘Some Conversations at Vichy’, although this might have impacted on the box office figures). An obvious point of comparison is The Crucible, which also features a great deal of political and ideological chit-chat. In The Crucible, the central characters make decisions and have them blow up in their faces in real time: we see it happening, and so we feel drawn along by the drama. In Incident at Vichy, in contrast, there is a sense in which the decisions have been made elsewhere, and the characters are mostly engaging in post hoc squabbling (there was one exception to this, of which more anon).

The strengths and weaknesses of the script were to an extent mirrored by those of the production. Some of the actors had very little to work with in terms of characterisation; others were lumbered with gratingly one-dimensional personae. I felt sorry for Ben Whittle; the Boy begging the other prisoners to pawn a ring for his starving mother could have been more sentimental only had he been played as a loveable Cockney urchin. Similarly, David Head’s Old Jew sat hunched over, occasionally coughing, for most of the play, without doing anything at all. A character doesn’t have to be constantly interacting with others to have an impact, but it was hard to see what difference his presence made to anyone else.

Salter and Usden established very clear initial personae and each developed this without abandoning it

Of the main players, I felt the most successful were Ben Salter and Adam Usden. Each established a very clear initial persona (aristocratic brittleness from Salter, a clearly forced composure from Usden), and each developed this without abandoning it. In Salter’s case, this led to some of the few discussions of abstract ideas with which the cast members seemed comfortable; a particular highlight was his brilliant speech on the nothingness of modern man and the sincerity of the Nazis. The key to the character of Von Berg is the balance between his genuine concern for the plight of the others and his reluctance to descend to their social level in order to help them. Salter was able to set up and adjust the balance here without ever lurching from one to the other. In contrast, Monceau’s inability to help the others is more a matter of his own denial about the situation in which he finds himself; he cannot help them because he cannot help himself. What this character requires is not a balance between competing tendencies, but a surface performance beneath which we can glimpse the underlying panic. Usden was precise enough to suggest the latter without ever exposing it, even as his initial sang-froid evaporated in the face of Bhat’s probing.

…there was a certain lack of detail in the characterisation…

Unfortunately, I felt some of the other actors didn’t find the kind of individual touches this play desperately needed, to transform its collection of mouthpieces and functional roles into persons. Kieran Sims commanded the early stages as Bayard, the socialist agitator; he had the requisite charisma, but his Bayard could have been any socialist agitator. Something similar could be said of Bhat’s psychoanalyst Leduc and Gareth Davies’s painter Lebeau, whose nervousness was so pronounced that it became forced. In each case, commitment was not lacking on the part of the actor, but I felt the shading of gesture, tone, pace and rhythm which marks out an individual character was. Callum Cheatle, playing one of the officers, provided an interesting contrast. He had a pretty clear individual take on his character, particularly in his rant towards the end of the play, but his staccato speech and rigid movements felt too stagey – a case of a good actor not quite relaxing into his role.

These problems point to one limitation of Rebecca MacKinnon’s direction, a certain lack of detail in the characterisation (possibly inevitable given the production’s short preparation time). However, I also thought the production suffered from a lack of a clear directorial vision. For example, it was difficult to see what staging the piece in the Norman Chapel contributed apart from a sense of intimacy. In quite a few places the sightline issues caused by the columns stymied the work of the actors. Another problem was the rhythm which the situation imposed on proceedings; every few minutes the officers would arrive to haul off another prisoner. The production badly needed some kind of counter-rhythm to set against this, but never found it. As a result, there were stretches when I found myself counting how many prisoners were left and wondering how long the officials would take to process them.

The success of the production as a dramatic work to a great extent depended on the final long exchange between Salter and Bhat, arguably the only truly dramatic scene in the play. I may be in a minority, but it did not work for me. This isn’t so much to do with the exchange itself, but with its place in the play as a whole. This scene resolved only a small part of what had gone before, and therefore didn’t feel like the point towards which the play had been building. It was the right ending, but for the wrong play. Furthermore, we had already sat through a number of emotionally charged scenes, and when these don’t lead into each other they tend to drain each other’s impact. So while Salter and Bhat gave it their best shot, they couldn’t achieve the sense of climax required to deliver a genuine catharsis. This was true both of the play itself and this production; the ambition of each outstripped what was delivered.