23-Apr-2009

FOUR  STARS!

Rural life seldom gets a look-in on our metropolitan stages, but rural touring company Eastern Angles is keeping the voices of villagers alive in this excellent, small-scale, verbatim-style piece that is largely playing in village halls and barns. Catch it wherever you can, because it charts a way of life that has always been changing, but which now is changing beyond recognition. There is a lovely moment when an old man simply lists the varieties of apples that are no longer grown in the old apple orchard, itself under threat because supermarkets demand fruit of a uniform size.

Akenfield, Ronald Blythe's oral history of two Suffolk villages, was first published in 1969 and has been in print ever since. In 2004, Canadian Craig Taylor spent time talking to the current inhabitants of the villages for Return to Akenfield. The book provides the backbone for this show, staged with economy and craft by Naomi Jones on Mika Handley's design, which, with its receding telegraph poles, cleverly evokes the Suffolk landscape.

The show is 20 minutes too long and a touch repetitive in the second half, but what is wonderful is the way it charts without nostalgia a past being erased by the present. As one old-time resident comments, people used to miss Akenfield through lack of interest; now they miss it because of the speed of the B1078. Soon it might be entirely gone, village life destroyed by the effect of Tesco Direct on local amenities, the lack of public transport and the second-home owners. There's no bitterness, just an acceptance that things do change. Return to Akenfield may not tell you anything you don't already know about the pressures on village life, but it does it with immediacy, grace and authenticity.

Lyn Gardner

02-Mar-2009

Craig Taylor's Return to Akenfield does what it says on the tin: he returns to the same area of Suffolk covered by Ronald Blythe's seminal Akenfield, which was first published in 1969, and speaks to the people of the area. What emerges in the two books is both fascinating as social history and compelling as human stories.

Naomi Jones's adaptation of Taylor's 2006 book is inspired and uplifting - a magical evocation of life in one small area of the world and a paean to the county of Suffolk. And one cannot imagine it being presented on the stage better than by Eastern Angles and the wonderful cast of five.

Between them, Sally Ann Burnett, Richard Earl, Robert Macpherson, David Redgrave and Charlotte Thompson create no fewer than 38 memorable characters, from a 97-year-old ex-colonial railway administrator to a 19-year-old waitress.

On a simple dais with a few chairs and a table, backed by coat racks on which hang the clothes and props they use throughout the presentation, the company of five is on stage throughout. Mika Handley's design has three simple telegraph poles receding in height diagonally across the area, economically and dramatically emphasising the flat landscape that is home to these people.

Jones has used the tale of a Polish migrant worker in his early twenties, and his on-off relationship with a girl he meets in a café, to frame the drama. Robert Macpherson is superb as the Pole, intelligent, wary, conscious of an upbringing quite at odds with most of the people he finds himself amongst.

Charlotte Thompson plays the girl. It is a performance of simple sincerity. Richard Earl appears as an National Farmers' Union rep and fills in much of the farming background - how one man driving a huge tractor now does the work of eight; how the farmer/employee relationship has changed, mostly for the better. David Redgrave is superb as older characters including an Ould Boy who trims the grass in the churchyard for free just because he wants to see it tidy (sound effects, as elsewhere, provided by the talented company). Sally Ann Burnett catches perfectly the lady priest with her three parishioners. Only the opening to the second half, when Ronald Blythe, Craig Taylor and Peter Hall (who directed a film of Blythe's book in 1974) talk about the project, seems gratuitously tacked on.

Otherwise, the adaptation is faultless. As the man sitting on the next seat said to his neighbour as we stood for the interval: "Certainly recognise a lot of what's going on there."

High praise indeed.

Hugh Homan, The Stage

27-Feb-2009

Follow-ups always fascinate. On television they can dip every seven years into the lives of a group of Sixties children, discovering how class differences at birth affect their futures. And in Craig Taylor's recent book, dramatised here, they reveal the changes to a fictitious Suffolk village since its inhabitants told the stories that Ronald Blythe gathered for his 1969 book Akenfield.

Taylor followed the pattern of Blythe's book in speaking to a wide range of villagers and assembling their tales into a sequence of monologues. I had feared this might also be the structure of the play drawn from his book, which would have been interesting but short on verve. But what he and his co-writers, Ivan Cutting and Naomi Jones, have cunningly done is to weave elements of many of the stories into others so that longer accounts vary with short vignettes, and reported speech turns into dialogue. They even bring together a Polish fruit picker and a discontented local girl to make a tale of mutual misunderstanding that surfaces in café, pub and lane throughout the evening.

Jones is also the director of the play, produced by Eastern Angles and touring from now until June throughout, as the company's name suggests, East Anglia. Some of the venues will be actual theatres but the cast of five will mostly play in village halls, church halls, even barns.

Much has changed in Akenfield since 1969. As well as migrant workers there are newcomers and commuters, some of them nostalgics for a rural past, others grimly defined as "they drive 4x4s". Old ways that were shrinking when Blythe was writing have shrunk further, yet a cheering vitality, perkiness and sheer love of the land keep emerging from these thoughtful revelations of modern country life.

On a bare stage where three telegraph poles of diminishing size suggest the fields of Suffolk, the production reinforces the sense of community by having chairs, shawls and bunches of flowers handled by different actors in different scenes. In all they play 45 characters: Sally Ann Burnett and Charlotte Thompson divide the female roles, David Redgrave specialises in old-timers, Richard Earl the arrivistes and Robert Macpherson the young ones. The story begins in an orchard, ends in a graveyard, and the sense of recording human history in all its changes emerges sweetly, sadly, hopefully and stirringly.

Jeremy Kingston - The Times.

27-Feb-2009

Many of a certain age will recall the book of the late 60s and the film of the 70s about fictional Akenfield in rural Suffolk with all the stresses of farming life then. Now it's updated with migrant workers, intensive farming and supermarket buying power, making it relevant to now, whether we live in town or countryside.

One old character says - I never dreamed how much things would change. None of us ever does, and that's the truth, the power of this fine piece.

Canadian playwright, Craig Taylor presents it in verbatim theatre style, where the voices (some real, some fictional) of forty five characters from Akenfield and surroundings are brought to life by five talented actors, including Charlotte Thompson from Gorleston and David Redgrave from Lowestoft.

There is mainly direct address to the audience, a series of interwoven anecdotes, soapbox views and heartfelt confessions, as we identify with their lives, loves and tragedies. It's a challenge to perform, not just the multi-roling without leaving the stage, but because it's not a play with interactions in a traditional sense.

They carry it off magnificently with director Naomi Jones achieving a pacy reality that makes for an evening running the full gamut of our emotions from the very funny to the rather heavy sense of death in the air at the end.

A triumph of tradition with new theatrical approaches. It's on tour. See it!

David Porter - East Anglian Daily Times & Eastern Daily Press.

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