The Standard
7-20 May 1983

By Charles Spencer

THER WORLDS, Robert Holman's new play at the Royal Court, is a perplexing and ultimately irritating enigma.
After almost three hours of slow but absorbing drama it is as if this talented writer had suddenly lost interest in all that has gone before.
In the final scene the detailed naturalism which sustains most of the work is brutally cast aside In favour of a cheap and apparently motiveless coup de theare. The effect Is like watching a skilled landscape painter suddenly ruining his delicately-painted canvas with a great gash of crude primary colour. Other Worlds is set during the Napoleonic wars and tells the story of a feud between the fishermen of Robin Hood's Bay in North Yorkshire and farmers who live nearby.
Enclosures have deprived the fishermen of the common land which helped supplement their meagre income and after a pitched battle between the two communities resentment and fear still linger 20 years on.
Holman tells his tale with a relish for character, great detail and a real and often moving warmth. The touching love affair between a farmer's maid and a fisherman determined on self-improvement is destroyed by the festering hatred and the author powerfully demonstrates how suspicion can grow rather than diminish with the passing of the years.
But the author plants the seed fo his own play's destruction early on. A ship is wrecked in a terrible storm, and its mascot, a gorilla, appears to be the only survivor. The fishermen have never seen such an animal and when they discover guns on the wreck assume it is an invading Frenchman.
This, while straining credibility, is just about plausible, but in the final scene, and without explanation, the gorilla talks. The careful truthful observation of what has gone before appears to count for nothing as the audience Is brutally pushed into the world of absurdist drama.
Before this there are moments of anachronistic banality, but Holman is capable of spellbinding dialogue and there is a compassionate feeling for the strength as well as the weakness of human nature, of ordinary people's longing for other and better worlds.
Richard Wilson directs with unhurried sensitivity, John Byrne has created evocative sets which conjure the seaside out of tattered rags, and there are some fine performances, especially from Rosemary Leach as a strong-willed sympathetic farmer 's widow, Jim Broadbent as her sad and oafish son and Paul Copley as the luckless lover who finally strives to reconcile the warring communities.

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