7-20 May 1983
here
is a North Yorkshire legend about an ape, shipwrecked on the coast during
the Napoleonic wars, who was taken for a Frenchman by ignorant locals and
hanged. At the end of Robert Holman's Other Worlds (Royal Court)
this wronged visitor from another landscape speaks his mind. His subject
is love and forgiveness.
If apes could speak,
perhaps that would be their burden: who knows? I have no quarrel with the
several circus elements that Holman throws into his play of painstaking
realism, but rather with its blanched schematism and girth (it lasts nearly
three hours). Robert [sic] Wilson, who directs, would have done far better
to have confined it, like Holman's previous works, to a three-sided studio
theatre.
The play relies
on atmosphere of the lyrical but rather drab and homely sort that one finds
contemporary regional poetry. Set against the backdrop of the wars and the
rapid change induced by the beginning of the industrial revolutions, the
play tells the story of clan warfare between a group of farmers and fishermen,
in which the children, crossing the line through bye, are the real victims.
There are echoes of "Romeo and Juliet," of course, but also of
Northern Ireland.
Holman buoys up
his inexpressive Yorkshire folk--could they really be as dour, even in the
eighteenth century, as writers would have us believe?with with flashes of
humour, and the love scenes, especially as played by Juliet Stevenson, luminous
and utterly truthful, are very affecting. I was less enamoured of the author's
tacit dichotomy, which is echoed in John Byrne's handsome sets, between
the tamed and tortured lives of those who are tied to the kind and the fisherfolk's
sensuous Gipsy bliss (Anita Carey's fisherwomen, with baby at her breast
on a balmy seashore evening, looks as if she'll bunt into "Carmen").
Rosemary Leach
plays the agricultural matriarch whose outspokeness makes others take her
for a witch; and Jim Broadbent, huge and stringy haired, does wonders with
the virtually aphasic part of her doltish son. The play ends with the possibility
of a truce in the formation of a village school serving both communities;
but only the ape has made us believe that it could happen.
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