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The Thunderbolt
Orange Tree Theatre Autumn 2010
This adventurous Richmond theatre makes something of a specialty of
rediscovering hundred-year-old plays, and they've delivered another gem
with Arthur Wing Pinero's 1908 melodrama-satire.
Using a contested will as his
starting point, Pinero artfully dissects provincial middle class
pretensions and hypocrisy while still giving us several characters to
care for.
And director
Sam Walters, with his usual sensitivity to the period, guides his large
cast (Who else but the National does plays with 16 characters?) through
an engrossing and thoroughly satisfying evening.
The play runs close to three
hours, and wouldn't have been hurt by a little trimming, but I've been
to many hour-long plays that felt much longer.
A rich man has died without a
will, and his siblings, all big social fish in a small town, immediately
begin salivating over the estate.
The discovery
of an illegitimate daughter is a minor complication, especially since
the attractive and independent young woman denies any intention of
fighting for a cut of the spoils. But what if there is a will after all?
Pinero's satiric barbs are
aimed primarily at the family members, unctuously supportive and united
but immediately backbiting whoever has just left the room, and quick to
spend the money they haven't actually got yet, and he invites us to
enjoy watching them dig themselves deeper and deeper into their moral
and economic holes.
The play's sympathies lie with
the one honourable brother and his wife (naturally disdained by the rest
of the family) and with the daughter, who are faced with ever more
disturbing moral dilemmas as the plot thickens.
Indeed, by the interval, Pinero seems to have written himself into a
moral corner from which no happy escape seems possible, and one of the
pleasures of the play is watching him find his way to a satisfactory
conclusion.
As always, Sam Walters stages
things expertly in this theatre-in-the-round, so that even with a dozen
or more actors present the sightlines are clear, and as always he guides
his actors to rounded characterisations that, for all their satirical
quality, never lapse into mere cartoons.
Special acting honours go to Gráinne Keenan as the daughter, Stuart Fox
and Natalie Ogle as the trying-to-do-the-right-thing couple, and Geoff
Leesley as the leader of the family jackal pack.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review of The Thunderbolt - Orange Tree Theatre 2010