7-20 May 1983
obert
Holman's play braces us with a stormy seascape, then lulls us into the routine
of a Yorkshire farm with the even pace and soothing rhythms of, say, Emmerdale
Farm. But this is 1797: Boney is threatening invasion, the farmers and the
fisherfolk hate one another for some unmentionable atrocity of 20 years
before; and young Betsy is pestering the briskly matriarchal lady of the
farm about the mystery of her origins.
It would be lèse-majesté
to suggest that the Royal
Court is playing host to a soap opera, but reminded
of ITV's recent foray into du Maurier country, I kept wishing I was watching
this everyday story of feuding folk piecemeal on the box--possibly over
a dyspeptic Sunday tea, since it boasts solid virtues associated with costume
serials.
The quiet industriousness
of a farmhouse kitchen is comfortably caught. The smallness of the 18th-century
rural world, its brutality and paternalism, superstition and desired self-improvement,
are suggested. Period touches in the dialogue indicate a local nearer to
Jamaica Inn than the Rover's Return.
As if uneasy about
constructing a full-length plot, the author cheats. The second act is a
recollection--the term "flashback" implies a swiftness and concentration
that elude the leisurely writing--of the scarring and bitter events of two
decades previously: the tragic love of the farm maid and a fisherman and
the fisherfolk's attempted recapture of enclsoed common land. Murder ensues.
To reintroduce
the victim after 20 years, in the last act, with the solemn explanation,
"I was left for dead," is twisting the plot's arm with a vengeance.
The creaks grow louder when the returned corpse blandly revests an ignorance
of his grown-up daughter despite a lifetime spent in the neighbourhood.
Perhaps to compensate
far such improbabilities, Mr Holman occasionally plunges into fantasy. The
bereaved maid is comforted by a midget fairground conjuror whom she at first
takes for a boggart (yes, a boggart: ther's nowt so fanciful as Yorkshire
folk though their hearts may be brekkin). Similar desperate padding includes
a wild welter of whimsy when a captured ape resorts to human speech to comfort
an urchin about to be hanged as a French spy (the ape is hanged for being
a Frenchman).
Ultimately this
jogging, slightly meandering, blend of historical romance, adventure serial
and BBC schools history lesson is held together by its cast. Rosemary Leach
can't quite reconcile the moral ambiguities of an ostensibly sensible and
good-hearted matriarch who lets a cadaver vanish from her husband's property
without twitching a bustle, but her strength, warmth and integrity find
an echo in Juliet Stevenson as both the forlorn maid and her daughter. I
look forward to the small screen version.
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