7-20 May 1983
F
YOU EVER felt you didn't know enough about the rivalry of fishermen and
farmers on the North Yorkshire coast in the late 18th century, go to the
Royal Court Theatre immediately and see Robert Holman's Other Worlds. It
will quickly (or rather slowly) put you in the picture.
It is a, presumably,
everyday tale of country folk who took gorillas for Frenchmen and wandering
girls for boys and generally mistook or masked the identities of one another
for various reasons.
However, if it
isn't history you are after, but the art of dramaturgy, then this chronicle
of divided communities and the aspirations of their members may be disappointing.
For, although Mr. Holman knows his subject apparently backwards his middle
act is a flashback of 20 years so that we an enjoy a long-lost father's
reunion with his daughter--Mr. Holman seems unable to bring the strands
of his narrative together satisfactorily so as to give it continuous focus
or engage snore than passing sympathy for his characters.
They come out only
as figures in a landscape, representing the era and the region honestly
enough but forming only part of such a generalised picture that we feel
under instuction rather than a dramatic spell.
If the technique
is weak, the sense of period is strong, and strange. When we meet for the
second time the gorilla which stupid fishermen mistook for a Frenchman,
it speaks with compassion of its jailers as being people who know no better,
and mustn't be blamed. Mr. Holman writes with comparable understanding of
the simple-minded people to whom enlightenment seems on the way as the curtain
falls, with talk of a school for both fishermen and farmers.
Nor does he fail
to remind us forcibly of the struggle against bigotry facing young lovers
from opposed communities. But the struggle to bring his story before us
in Richard Wilson's production charmingly designed by John. Byrne, is all
too obvious in this world of ponderous bucolic naivety.
Juliet Stevenson
and Paul Copley do all they can to make the lovers important and Rosemary
Leach is the tight-lipped mother in this benighted and embattled world.
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