'My Eyes Went Dark'

At 11:35 p.m. on Monday, 1 July 2002, Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937, a Russian-built Tupolev-154 passenger jet en route from Moscow to Barcelona, Spain, collided with DHL Flight, a Boeing 757-200 cargo plane on its way from Bergamo, Italy, a stop-over on its flight from Bahrain, to Brussels.  The collision happened over  Überlingen, Germany, near Lake Constance, killing all 71 people on board; both crew members of DHL 611 perished as well.  Among the passengers were Svetlana Kaloyeva, 44, and her two children, Konstantin, 10, and Diana, 4, the family of internationally successful Russian architect Vitaly Kaloyev, 45, who were on their way to join their husband and father, in Spain working on a large construction project, for a beach vacation on the Costa Dorada.  

The airspace in which the midair crash occurred, bordering Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, was under the control of a private air-traffic  control company, Skyguide, operating out of Zürich, Switzerland.  The accident was the result of technical problems caused by on-going repairs and a delayed response from the only air-traffic  controller on duty, whose colleague was sleeping in the corridor outside the control room.  An inquiry called the cause “a mistake,” a conclusion that enraged the architect.  No one was found responsible or even apologized, let alone received punishment.  Unhinged by grief, Kaloyev, who came from the Caucasian Russian province of North Ossetia, became obsessed with getting revenge for the decimation of his entire family.  Hiring a private investigator from Moscow, the architect identified and traced the ATC whom he blamed for the loss of his family, Peter Nielsen, a Danish citizen who lived in Kloten, a suburb of Zürich. 

On Saturday, 21 February 2004, the Ossetian architect left Russia and flew to Zürich and checked into a hotel near Koten.  At a few minutes before 6 o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, 24 February, just under two years after the crash, Kaloyev arrived at Nielsen’s house and, after confronting the ATC in front of his house, stabbed the man to death with a 5½-inch knife.  Nielsen’s wife was inside the home, but his three children had come outside with their father.  Nielsen was 36 years old when he was killed.

Kaloyev was arrested by Swiss police at the Kloten hotel the next evening and on 26 October 2005, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to eight years in prison.  In 2007, however, the architect was paroled and on 8 November, he was released and returned home to North Ossetia, where he was greeted as a hero.  Kaloyev was appointed regional Deputy Minister of Architecture and Construction.  Ossetia is a region with a long tradition of tolerating vendettas.

These are the bare bones of the real-life incident on which British playwright Matthew Wilkinson based his 2015 play, My Eyes Went Dark, a two-actor play that premièred that year on 25 August at the Finborough Theatre in London, co-produced with Cusack Projects Ltd., directed by the playwright with Cal MacAnnich as the architect and Thusitha Jayasundera as everybody else.  In August 2016, the play went to the Edinburgh Festival, playing at the Traverse Theatre.  The text of My Eyes Went Dark was published in 2015 by Oberon Books of London and is also available in e-book format.  The story of the crash of Bashkirian 2937 has also been told in the 2017 film Aftermath, with a character based on Vitaly Kaloyev played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

From 7 June to 2 July 2017, My Eyes ran in Theater B at the 59E59 Theaters with Jayasundera and Declan Conlon replacing MacAnnich as part of the theater’s Brits Off Broadway (23 March-3 July 2017, this year).  It was a co-production with 107group of London in association with Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and London’s Cusack Projects.  Diana, my frequent theater companion, called me in the afternoon on Saturday, 1 July, to suggest we catch the show, which had opened on 14 June, that evening; we met at the theater complex at 8:15 p.m. for the production’s penultimate 75-minute performance in the little variable-space black box on 59E59’s third floor.

I’m not familiar with Wilkinson’s work (Sun is Shining – London, 2002/Brits Off Broadway, 2004; Red Demon – adaptation from Hideki Noda, 2003; Red Sea Fish – U.K. and Brits Off Broadway, 2009), so I don’t know if this is typical, but he wrote My Eyes Went Dark as if it had been adapted from a journal or letters or interview transcripts.  (The story is recounted in myriad news accounts and there are even Wikipedia pages for Kaloyev and Bashkirian 2937.)  It’s also only lightly fictionalized—the architect has become Nikolai Koslov, his wife is now Marya (the Koslov children, who don’t appear in the play, are Anya, 4, and Yakov, 8), and Peter Nielsen is called Thomas Olsen; the building project was in Nice on France’s Côte d’Azur—so the playwright has surrendered control of the material to the various chroniclers of the actual history.  As anyone who’s had any experience with documentary theater knows (see my blog article “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” 9 October 2009), hewing too closely to the historical facts, especially the chronology, can make problems in the drama department.  If the writer lets the reality drive the structure, he loses control; with fiction, he’s always in charge. 

That’s the impression My Eyes Went Dark gave me: Wilkinson tried to squeeze way too much of the history into his 75-minute drama, perhaps led by his attraction to some of the moving anecdotes and telling moments in Kaloyev/Koslov’s story—given his obsessiveness, there are a lot them—and telling too much of the story to get to his dramatic point.  For example, in an early scene Koslov gives a detailed explanation of why a private company handles the air-traffic  control of this bit of Central European territory.  It’s complicated and largely unnecessary—and it’s also hard to see why the grieving man would have to explain it to anyone anyway.  Those involved in the crash would already know this, and we don’t need to know it.  What we end up with is a string of disjointed episodes covering some five years that don’t cohere.  (There’s no dramaturg listed in the program; Wilkinson could have used one, or at least an editor.)

The most significant detriment Wilkinson’s decision has is that it prevents him from making clear what his point is—what he wants us to understand from My Eyes.  If all the playwright wants to accomplish is to stage a portrait of a man obsessed with revenge, that’s just not sufficient to sustain even an hour and a quarter of stage time.  Besides not being particularly dramatic ultimately, it quickly becomes boring.  If he had something more in mind, it never made it to the page and certainly not to the stage.  At least, I couldn’t figure it out—and neither could Diana.  I guess a lesson for a play based on material like this is: less fact, more truth.  Less reality, more imagination.

This tactic also burdened Jayasundera with so many characters to portray that she had a hard time differentiating them all—and I had a hard time distinguishing them.  I can’t even be sure if each scene introduces a new personality for her, or if any of them repeat.  (Some can be identified from the performance context, such as another bereaved parent, Koslov’s sister, a little girl who’s obviously a neighbor and playmate of Yakov’s, and Thomas Olsen.  They all have names in the published script, but few are named in the dialogue.  Jayasundera’s prodigious efforts to make them each distinct is probably the reason for the actress’s nomination for an Off West End Theatre Award in 2015.)  As for Declan Conlon as Koslov, he was constrained to give pretty much a one-dimensional characterization: a man with a single-minded purpose.  Even if Kaloyev was that man in reality, it’s not a viable stage persona.  Wilkinson, who’s also an actor himself, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, leaves the actor nowhere to go.  I mean, Koslov had moods, but they’re all variations on his single-mindedness—his love, his anger, his frustration, even his victoriousness.  There’s no development.  Conlon (who bears an occasional resemblance to Jonathan Pryce) does a creditable job depicting this, but it’s an exercise in acting technique.   My Eyes Went Dark  ends up a one-note play with nowhere for Conlon to go as Koslov wallows in his grief and obsesses about revenge.   It became enervating and boring despite (or maybe because of) Conlon’s high-pitched performance. 

I found My Eyes un- and even anti-dramatic and even un-theatrical, despite obvious attempts by the designers to infuse it with theatrical FX, particularly Elliot Griggs’s lighting, which included illuminated mist and a square patch of light on the floor that represented the granite grave marker that Kaloyev compulsively tends and cleans, and Max Pappenheim’s sound, including the harrowing (and loud) roar of the collision.  The minimalist set designed by Bethany Wells (who also did the costumes) was a strip across the small playing area—the audience sits on two sides—that forms a kind of narrow runway demarked by a shiny, black, mylar-like runner (on which entering spectators were admonished not to walk, toward which end a mat was temporarily laid across the strip like Raleigh’s cloak) with a molded plastic chair at each end.  A panel of six Fresnel lights is mounted behind each chair.  There were no props at all; everything that Conlon handled was mimed.  All of this was something of a technical accomplishment—the 59E59 staffer who greeted Diana touted the lighting—but I have no idea what any of it represented, especially the mylar strip of which the theater was so protective.

As of 2 July, Show-Score had collected 22 published reviews, of which 12 were of the New York production.  The average score of those local notices was 70, with 50% of the New York reviews positive, 42% mixed, and 8% negative.  Show‑Score’s highest rating was a single 90 (Theater Pizzazz), backed by one 85 (Broadway World), and a low score of a single 40 (New York Times), the only negative notice.  My round-up will cover six reviews.

After summarizing the account of the air crash, Maya Phillips asserted in the New York Times that Kaloyev’s tale is “a story worthy of the most memorable of characters, from Medea to Inigo Montoya,” but that in My Eyes Went Dark “Matthew Wilkinson . . . creates a drama that ultimately feels more like a true-crime movie of the week.”  Phillips complained, “Too often . . . the script jumps face first into scenes, then flounders as the exposition-laden dialogue tries to pick up the slack” even though “[t]he staging, from the crystal-clear sound design to the dynamic flash-and-fade lighting, effectively guides the play through hopscotching shifts in setting and time.”  Of the cast, the Times reviewer wrote, “Ms. Jayasundera moves deftly from role to role, though she’s ill served by some of the less developed ones.  Mr. Conlon’s Koslov is an unfinished sketch, barely shaded beyond his revenge.”  Of Koslov, Phillips felt that “hints of more complex disillusionment and guilt” seemed “sudden and not wholly explored, and the peak emotional moments verge on the melodramatic.”  She concluded, “In claustrophobically bringing us close to a character defined purely by his grief, ‘My Eyes Went Dark’ at once presents us with too little and broadcasts too much . . . .  Such missteps are dramatically felt in such a trim production.”

In Time Out New York, Helen Shaw characterized My Eyes as “a fragmented and disturbing” rendering of the “barely fictionalized account of” Kaloyev’s story.  She found the play “upsetting for its content” and added that she felt “Wilkinson’s use of these events is troubling, particularly since he ends his drama on a sudden note of sentimental uplift for the killer, with a soaring soundtrack and heavenly overhead light.”  Shaw complimented “the superb, chameleonic Thusitha Jayasundera” and reported that she and Conlon “stalk each other up and down a tiny alleyway between two banks of seats, so we’re painfully close to their screaming and anguish.”  The playwright, affirmed the TONY reviewer, has a “precise ear for dialogue [that] makes his succession of brief scenes convincing, and My Eyes Went Dark has power as a high-intensity acting showcase.” She complained, though, that “there’s too little analysis of the mechanisms of revenge and forgiveness.  Instead,” Shaw objected, “the play offers intense, histrionic moments that we thrill to as voyeurs, not as thinkers.”  She concluded, “Actual grief and actual murder are repurposed for our dark entertainment, and there’s something ugly in that.”

Talkin’ Broadway’s Howard Miller, calling Wilkinson’s play “wrenching,” labeled My Eyes Went Dark a “story of trauma and revenge” with Koslov, played by Conlon “with a laser-like intensity” and Jayasundera bringing all the other characters “fully to life by instantaneously changing her demeanor, accent, and vocal expression.”  Miller reported, “These two finely wrought performances are honed to a sharp edge by” playwright-director Wilkinson.  The TB review-writer concluded that My Eyes “makes for a most unsettling evening that raises at least as many questions as it addresses.”  On Broadway World, Marina Kennedy characterized the play as “emotional, thought-provoking drama” and “a very timely piece of theater that examines a tragedy from a rarely seen perspective.”  She declared Conlon (“an evocative, heartrending performance”) and Jayasundera (“swiftly and precisely assumes her roles”) “extraordinary acting talents.”  Kennedy’s final analysis was that My Eyes Went Dark “is an intriguing play that will surely captivate metro area audiences.”

After reminding us that Spaniard Lope de Vega, Shakespeare’s contemporary, “said all you need for theatre is ‘three boards [or four: sources vary], two actors, and a passion,’” Samuel L. Leiter asserted on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side, “That seems the guiding aesthetic behind My Eyes Went Dark.”  Leiter admitted that though the play, “as dark as its title, was very warmly received when performed” in London, “for all its potential, it left me cold.”  My Eyes Went Dark unfolds “in an episodic, sometimes elliptical, at other times straightforward manner,” affirms Leiter, complaining, “Sincere as all this is, and significant as are its concerns with vengeance, forgiveness, guilt, and responsibility, the cool, quiet, low-keyed, soporifically paced production sometimes almost made my own eyes go dark.”  The TLS blogger praised Jayasundera for her versatility, but complained that “it would help if Wilkinson’s approach weren’t quite so austere and he offered some small clues . . . to each of her roles instead of making it a guessing game.”  Conlon, Leiter found, however, “is less interesting; an obviously polished actor, he nonetheless seems too dryly removed for a man so consumed by sadness and anger.”  Like me, this reviewer felt, “When [Conlon’s] emotions burst out they seem more like theatrical displays than organic expressions.”  The production, Leiter reported, depended on Pappenheim’s “exceptionally expressive sound design” and Griggs’s “nice moody lighting effects.”

On Theater Pizzazz, Carole Di Tosti dubbed My Eyes a “taut drama” that Wilkinson has written and directed “with thoughtful precision.”  The TP review-writer reported, “The production is a performance tour de force,” but warned, “You will have to fasten your seat belts to follow the opaque, tense, and emotional journey.”  Di Tosti deemed “Koslov’s journey . . . frighteningly real,” finding that “the playwright drives the themes unbearably close to home,” creating “an intriguing mental exercise.”  She declared “the play’s power and dynamism are trenchant,” resulting in “an exceptional achievement in a production that is stylized and expressionistic.”

After we left the theater, talking about what we’d witnessed, Diana reread some of the review quotations on the promotional post card 59E59 had sent out.  This is what had intrigued her enough to call me that afternoon.  Some of the notices cited were from the London or Edinburgh performances, and Diana wondered how they could record the reactions quoted when we both had found the production of My Eyes Went Dark so disappointing.  I suggested that we didn’t actually know what the passages excerpted had meant in context in the reviews from which they were drawn.  (When I quote from reviews in these play reports, I try very diligently not to misquote any writer or to take passages out of their intended context.)  When I got home, I decided to look up some of the published notices on line and see how they were quoted for the promotion.  One quotation, identified as Time Out, read: “a great, harsh modern tragedy.”  I quickly found that it wasn’t from Time Out New York (whose review I quoted myself above), so I looked for the U.K. editions of the magazine. 

I found two publications with reviews of My Eyes: Time Out London and Time Out Edinburgh.  Neither has a line like the one in the promotion.  The London edition had a headline that reads: “A great new tragedy from writer Matthew Wilkinson” (the underlining is mine) and the Edinburgh review contains the lines: “it’s practically Greek on the tragedy scale,” “‘My Eyes Went Dark’ is a tragedy that looks at human beings’ inherent need to exact revenge,” and “[Thusitha Jayasundera] is excellent, providing both humanity and a harsh calculated bureaucracy.”  That’s the closest I could come to words approximating the blurb.  I’m not prepared to call the advertising dishonest, but it certainly gives a wrong impression.

The quotation attributed to the Guardian, “brilliantly acted, meaty, tense drama . . . an extremely powerful play about justice, revenge and forgiveness,” was slightly more accurate: I found the second half (after the ellipsis) in the on-line edition of the review, but not the first part.  Now, maybe the on-line versions of these publications vary from the print editions, and maybe someone just made . . . well, “mistakes” (as ironic as that word is here), but that doesn’t prevent the promotional campaign from being misleading.  (New York has a law to prohibit blatantly quoting reviews out of context.  During the 1984-85 Broadway season, Lawrence Roman’s Alone Together was fined by the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs because of just such misuse of quotations in its advertising.)

'The Roundabout'

In my last play report (“The Little Foxes,” posted on 13 May), I confessed to a fondness for the old-time well-made plays of the middle of the last century, and I named several American playwrights whose works I particularly enjoy.  I wasn’t thinking trans-Atlanticly at the time I wrote that report, so let me amend my statement to include some British writers of the same era: Noël Coward, John Osborne, Emlyn Williams, and Terrence Rattigan (in small doses).  Some of J. B. Priestley’s plays fall into this grouping (An Inspector Calls; Time and the Conways), so when I got an announcement for the 59E59 Theaters’ presentation of Priestley’s The Roundabout as part of the production house’s annual Brits Off Broadway series (4 April through 2 July this year), I suggested to my frequent theater companion, Diana, that we consider seeing it.  (Diana is much more attracted to this kind of material than am I.  She likes art that follows rules.)

So, on Friday evening, 12 May, Diana and I met at the theater complex on East 59th Street between Park and Madison Avenues for the 8 p.m. curtain of Priestley’s 1931 comedy of manners, the play’s long-delayed U.S. première production.  The co-production of three London theater troupes, the Cahoots Theatre Company, the Other Cheek, and the Park Theatre, started previews in Theater A, the 196-seat house of the three-theater venue, on 20 April and opened to the press on 30 April; the visiting production was due to close on 20 May.  (The same show, with one cast change, ran at the Park Theatre in London from 24 August to 24 September 2016.) 

The Roundabout is a recently rediscovered Priestley play, written in 1931 as a vehicle for a 24-year-old Peggy Ashcroft (1907-91; later made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, or CBE, in 1956), but the playwright didn’t finish the script.  (The Roundabout was written a year before the playwright’s first West End success, Dangerous Corner.  In other words, it was a tyro effort.)  The next year, Roundabout was produced at the Playhouse Liverpool (without Ashcroft) for its Christmas season and was subsequently mounted at various regional theaters around the U.K, but it was never performed in London until the 2016 co-production at the Park, where the play, in its first U.K. revival since 1932, was generally well received.  (Especially well reviewed was the performance of Bessie Carter, an up-and-coming young actress, in the role Priestley intended for Ashcroft.  Carter is the only member of the British troupe who stayed behind in England, replaced here by Emily Laing.)  The presentation at 59E59 is the play’s only U.S. production on record, making it the U.S. première. 

Found by Hugh Ross, director of the current production, in his father’s collection of Priestley books and papers, The Roundabout: A Comedy in Three Acts had been published in London by Samuel French in 1933, an edition that’s long been out of print, and has now been republished by Oberon Books (London, 2017; also available as a NOOK e-book).  Not only has the play never been filmed (not surprising, given its stage history), but I also found no record of a television version, even in Britain—so there’s no video of The Roundabout. 

John Boynton Priestley (1894-1984) was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England.  In his nearly-90-year life, he became world famous as an novelist, playwright, essayist, broadcaster, scriptwriter, social commentator, and man of letters, whose career spanned the 20th century.  Many of his writings are leftist and critical of the British government (though The Roundabout makes targets of humor of both the aristocracy and communists.)  The writer chastised George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) in a 1941 essay in Horizon for the older playwright’s support of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (at the time, a partner with Hitler in a German-Soviet non-aggression pact); in 1949, however, George Orwell (1903-1950) put Priestley on his list of writers he considered too left-leaning to be allowed to write for the government’s anti-communist propaganda agency.  

As a newspaper columnist and critic, Priestley covered a variety of subjects and his writing revealed his anti-materialism and anti-mechanization.  His many published works include the novels Good Companions (1929) and Angel Pavement (1930), and the plays Time and the Conways (1937), When We Are Married (1938), and An Inspector Calls (1945), to name just a few of his many titles.  (Though The Roundabout is a rather straightforward well-made play structurally, as you’ll see, the plays that came after are experimental, particularly in terms of the depiction of  time.)  Priestley’s other books include the autobiographical Margin Released (1962),  Man and Time (1964), Essays of Two Decades (1968), The Edwardians (1970), and The English (1973).  He declined a peerage in 1965 and a knighthood in 1969, but accepted the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II in 1977.  He died on 14 August 1984 at the age of 89 (one month before his 90th birthday). Among his many awards and honors is a larger-than-life-sized bronze statue, commissioned after the writer’s death by the city of Bradford and unveiled in 1986 in front of the National Media Museum in Priestley’s hometown.  Priestley’s 1935 play Cornelius, also little known, was presented in Brits Off Broadway in 2013.

The playwright’s son, Tom (born the year The Roundabout débuted), said his father “described [the play] as ‘a very light comedy . . . a little less intellectually negligible than most very light comedies.’  Now at last,” Tom Priestley added, “we have a chance to judge.”  It’s a two-hour-and-20-minute three-acter, played here as two acts, with acts one and two combined, and it’s got an almost impossible plot to describe—all about the British aristocracy and commies (now there’s a combo!).  One New York reviewer quoted on the poster compared it to “the wit of Oscar Wilde, the frivolity of Coward, and the saltiness of Shaw” sort of all gemischt.  (Another proclaimed that “it is really a 1930’s rewrite of Shaw’s pre-W.W. I comedy Heartbreak House reset at the beginning of the Great Depression with versions of all the same characters,” but that’s a huge stretch.)  As Tom Priestley said, now we’ll see. 

The play’s set on a Saturday afternoon in 1931, a time when the British economy was in freefall as a consequence of the early days of the Great Depression.  Even among leftists—remembering that Priestley was a socialist—belief in the Soviet Union had eroded because of news of Stalin’s show trials.  The playwright attempted to weave these world-shaking occurrences together by depicting a farcically hectic day at the country house of Lord Richard Kettlewell (Brian Protheroe), a wealthy investor.  First, his portfolio is now virtually worthless, a situation he finds laughable.  Second, the house is invaded by all manner of mostly uninvited—and largely unwelcome—visitors who all decide to stay for lunch.  Already in residence is Alec Grenside (Ed Pinker), a young artist recommended by Kettlewell’s estranged wife to decorate some panels in the manor, and old friend Churton “Chuffy” Saunders (Hugh Sachs), a classic society hanger-on (and the only visitor who’s actually been invited) with a ready tongue and a sharp wit (think Oscar Wilde manqué).  Soon to show up unexpectedly are the daughter, Pamela (Emily Laing), he hasn’t seen in 10 years, now a devoted communist who’s been in the USSR working in a candy factory—terrible candy, by the way, says Pamela (though I found Soviet hard candy pretty good when I had a taste of it some 50-odd years ago)—and her companion and fellow ideologue who goes by the designation of Comrade Staggles (Steven Blakeley). 

Arriving as expected with some papers is Kettlewell’s secretary, a very young and callow Farrington Gurney (Charlie Field in his professional stage debut)—who just happens to conceive an immediate crush on Pamela.  They’re followed by the former grand dame of the neighborhood, Lady Knightsbridge (Richenda Carey), who circulates among the other local peers looking for employment for her lately straitened aristo friends, and Hilda Lancicourt (Carol Starks), Kettlewell’s current mistress whom he’s about to jettison as a money-saving move and who’s come in response to the letter Kettlewell sent to . . . well, dump her.  Pamela reveals that she’s also invited her mother, Lady Kettlewell (Lisa Bowerman), from whom His Lordship’s been separated for several years; it’s an announcement he doesn’t relish.  Rounding out the crowded household are Kettlewell’s two servants, his butler, Parsons (Derek Hutchinson), and the parlor maid, Alice (Annie Jackson), two of the most upright souls you’re ever likely to meet.  As Shaw pointed out, after all, the middle and working classes have the stronger sense of propriety—afflicted, as the great Irish playwright put it, with bourgeois morality; the poor and the aristocracy are less burdened since the poor can’t afford to have morals and the gentry are above such petty concerns.

Priestley’s portrait of a Depression-era dysfunctional extended family descends quickly into what I can only describe as a French farce as written by Wilde with a side of Shavian-lite political and social commentary, all enacted in the style of a Cowardy comedy of manners.  The drawing-room set may not have quite five doors (there are only three portals—no actual doors), but it might as well have with all the coming and going.  (A roundabout, by the way, is British English for both a merry-go-round and a traffic circle.)  Comrade Staggles, who looks like a prototypical commie student with round, steel-rimmed glasses, a student cap, work boots, and a scraggly beard, can’t help himself from making passionate advances to any woman he meets, from soon-to-be ex-mistress Lancicourt to housemaid Alice—none of whom will have any of it.  Lancicourt and Lady Kettlewell take every opportunity to button-hole His Lordship, as does his daughter, whose commitment to communism is more adolescent rebellion (she’s 22) than Leninist-Marxist conviction.  Young Gurney, the secretary, is Red Pam’s opposite number on the capitalist side of the debate—and he has a streak of schoolboy braggadocio that leads to a bout of fisticuffs in the garden with Staggles.  When Lady Knightsbridge learns that Kettlewell’s daughter is a communist, her immediate response is to inquire, “Is there any money in it?”  Chuffy, who has no reason to be anywhere in particular, pops in and out to deliver amusing, but lightweight aphorisms—though they’re still the best lines in the play!  In fact, Chuffy’s the best part in the play, with butler Parsons, who, with Alice, make frequent appearances both in pursuit of their household duties and to roil the overloaded plot.  (Parsons reminded me a little of William, the waiter in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell.)

In the end, little has changed on the socio-political front: the aristos are still aristos and their hangers-on are still hanging on, perhaps mildly chastened, and the servants remain servants.   A subplot that might have upset this order when Parson seems to have won a fortune on a sweepstakes race falls apart on a contrivance—Priestley seems to have chickened out.  Comrade Staggles comes to enjoy the luxuries wealth—and a little (too much) high-end brandy—provide.  The real conclusion is that old lovers are reunited as Mère and Père Kettlewell, maneuvered by Pamela, discover  their separation was a mistake--and new lovers, Pamela and the handsome young artist, Alec, turn out to have known each other all along and are brought together probably by the connivance of Pamela’s mother (who, you remember, sent Grenside to her husband in the first scene).

You got all that?  (And that’s just a précis.  I can’t manage a detailed retelling—and you couldn’t follow it if I did.)  It is a day, to paraphrase Lady Bracknell, crowded with incident.

I found the play mildly amusing, but not outright hilarious, though Diana liked it.  It’s more silly frippery than pointed comedy and the comparisons with Wilde, Coward, and Shaw are more about surface appearances than dramaturgical substance.  It doesn’t help that the topics Priestley is covering in The Roundabout are tied to the play’s time—the Depression, the potential of social change in Britain between the World Wars, the surge in popularity of Soviet communism before the revelations of the Stalinist atrocities—which doesn’t speak so much to our era.  This renders the Brits Off Broadway presentation more a curious look back, both at a period of British playwriting and at the work of one particular playwright of that time who’s less often produced than some of his peers, than a noteworthy experience in the theater.

I also feel that the comedy here’s played wrong.  The actors all approach the play more like Coward than anything else.  (Chuffy Saunders so resembles Wilde that I have to believe Priestley intentionally drew the portrait.  The somewhat stout Sachs plays him as slightly fey, in the vein of a certain stereotype of the effete aristo, which only reinforces the impression.)  The approach is flippant—all the earnest commie speechifying, is off-hand and light—but I think if it were played as if the characters—Laing’s Pamela and Blakeley’s Staggles are the two on that side of the ledger—were in earnest, it’d be funnier, especially in 2017.  I mean, how can anyone actually believe what the Bolshies were spouting back in the ’30s?  Really? 

The aristos probably should still be superficial—it suits them, especially when they’re all concerned about losing their money in the Depression.  (Here’s a coincidence: I just saw a play from the same decade about the merchant class gaining wealth, and now a play about the upper class losing it!  Both were written by left-leaning dramatists, though one author was an American woman and the other a British man, and one’s a melodrama and the other a farce—and the plays are set in different eras, 30 years apart.)  The two servants in the home, Hutchinson’s Parsons and Jackson’s Alice, seem to get the style for their characters just right, however.  As a result, they, plus the Wildean Chuffy, are the best in the ensemble, and the most memorable characters.

Once again, I was dealing with an ensemble cast—this one not as tightly blended as Daniel Sullivan’s Little Foxes company or Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s Jitney cast.  Like Little Foxes, however, two characters dominate the plot, Lord Kettlewell and Pamela, so Protheroe and Laing maintain the audience’s focus as the other characters swirl around them, weaving in and out of the narrative.  Protheroe’s a tad stiff as His Lordship, which lends an air of incredibility to the character’s protestations of encroaching poverty.  Protheroe’s physical characterization and his line delivery never vary much, making Kettlewell seem programmed rather than reactive.  Laing makes Pamela a flibbertigibbet, which is fine in context, and she has a slight overbite that gives her the appearance of a mischievous little girl.

Sachs has such a good time with Chuffy that it’s hard to find fault with the character—so I won’t.  He has all the best lines and the actor delivers them with delicious panache.  Of course, Chuffy has no reason to be in the play except to accomplish this—but, then, a real-life Churton Saunders would have been superfluous, too, except to amuse his hosts and keepers.  Blakeley couldn’t be more type-cast as Staggles—even without the beard and the glasses he looks like central casting’s idea of a student commie, a cross between Vladimir Lenin and John Lennon.  His sincerity as a communist might be questionable in this performance, but his neediness as a young man who clearly never fit in in any social circle is demonstrable.  Staggles’s opposite number in a sense is Field’s Farrington Gurney, as impetuous a fellow as you’re likely to meet anywhere (well, except maybe today’s White House, but that’s a different matter).  Field, who bears a remarkable resemblance to comedian Craig Kilbourne, plays Gurney as slightly dull-witted but open-faced: he doesn’t think deeply, but he feels strongly.  (He’d probably be labeled an incipient upper-class twit, if Priestley were that way inclined.)

So far, the characters are all from the period comedy of manners stock company; you’ve met them many times before in one play or movie or another—and the performances, while sturdy, are quite in line with expectations.  At the outset, the same holds true for Kettlewell’s two servants, Parsons and Alice.  Then Parsons gets word that he’s picked the winner in the sweepstakes and will come into a small fortune.  He appears drunk to inform Lord Kettlewell he’ll be leaving the estate’s service.  (He wants to buy a country house to convert into a weekend hotel, and Kettlewell immediately offers to sell the nascent entrant to the middle class his own manor.)  All of a sudden, Hutchinson transforms from a stock character actor into an intriguing figure with a backstory and an inner life we hadn’t seen hint of before.  Alas, it only lasts one scene, as Priestley contrives to pull the rug out from under poor Parsons with some nonsense about the government’s deciding precipitously that the prize is too much for the economy to bear and canceling it, making a Tantalus out of the unhappy butler, shown the promised land of entrepreneurship and swiftly returned to domestic service.  Hutchinson makes the double character shift with assurance and credibility within the context of the play.  Would that Priestley had braved the uncertainties and gone with the reversal of fortune.  It might have been great fun.

Polly Sullivan, credited as the production’s designer, appears to have been responsible for both the set (lit by David Howell) and the costumes (supervised by Holly Henshaw), and both were fine—the clothing more revealing than the scenery.  The costumes were appropriate to the period and the individual characters, from Pamela’s and Staggles’s proletarian worker-attire to the three upper-class dames’ elegant country-afternoon dress, but the house’s furnishings seemed Spartan for a peer—unless we’re supposed to assume Kettlewell’s been selling off the furniture (or burning it for fuel).  Not only was Parsons called upon to move a chair about to accommodate visitors because there weren’t enough in the conversation hub, but these nobs, who’d certainly never deign to sit on a wooden bench except outdoors, often had to perch on what looked like long, low tables on either side of the drawing room; there was even a table lamp on each one to make it look like Kettlewell’s houseguests were sitting on narrow coffee tables.  Coward would surely shudder at the sight!  (I don’t know how big any of the three co-producing troupes is, but this is the kind of staging decision that often marks Off-Off-Broadway shows in New York.  Budget and space limitations are the usual rationale.)

Overall, The Roundabout was a pleasant evening in the theater—I can’t honestly say I didn’t enjoy the play or the performance; I’m glad I took the opportunity to see it.  I just feel that director Ross missed the boat a little on the presentation style.  (Of course, I could be way off base, but we’ll never know.)

Show-Score surveyed 25 reviews, but a number of them were for the London mounting.  On the basis of 17 reviews of the Brits Off Broadway production, the average rating as of 21 May was 69, of which 59% of the notices were positive, 23% were mixed, and 18% were negative.  The site’s high score was 90, of which there were three for the local production (including the New York Times) and the low score was 20 (for the website Woman Around Town).  I’ll be covering 13 notices in my round-up.

After observing in the Epoch Times that communism is “categorically the most deadly form of government ever,” Mark Jackson declared,

So it can safely be said that breezy debates about the virtues of communism versus capitalism, in a high-twit-factor, three-act, moldy British drawing-room comedy—already so second-rate in its inception that it’s only being revived now, after its abandonment in 1932—is hardly the place to do the topic justice.

Listing all the plot twists, Jackson asked, “Will you care about any of it?”  Despite “quite a talented cast,” the Epoch review-writer asserted, “The problem is that it’s just not terribly funny or impactful,” adding, “It’s quite a bland offering.”  Jackson, though, found one positive note in the play: “Priestley does get credit for presenting two communists [sic] types: the holier-than-thou Tartuffe-like scoundrel and the youthful idealist who swallows socialist rhetoric hook, line, and sinker.”  But even that accomplishment is incomplete: “Unfortunately, since the playwright’s social commentary extends to the lord and ladies as well, his apt criticism of the far left is so undercut as to be insipid.”  In conclusion, the Epochal reviewer wrote that “this particular genre of play doesn’t age well, but if you’re a huge fan of, say, ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ [sic] and, like Chuffy, pine for spatterdashes [we know them simply as ‘spats’] and top hats, you’ll enjoy ‘The Roundabout’ immensely.”  (I think Jackson has overthought this slight work, but that’s his take; his review received a 45 on Show-Score, one of three negative notices.  My only serious objection to his opinion is the implied disparagement of Wilde’s Earnest, one of my all-time favorite plays—the only play I’ve directed twice.  I’ve worn spats only once in my life, however—part of a costume for some period play I no longer remember.)

Andy Webster, in contrast, declared in the New York Times (which scored 90, you’ll recall), “This sparkling, impeccably staged play . . . will be catnip to ‘Downton Abbey’ devotees, with equal doses of humor and insight.”  The Timesman explained that “plot threads and characters abound” in the “social mosaic” of The Roundabout.  He warned, though, “Some period conventions creak.” but added that “the production is well served by its costume supervisor” and director Ross “adds a soupçon of farce to the percolating proceedings.”  Webster concluded, “Throughout, Priestley gently reminds us of the ephemerality of affluence” while his “words, with their generous, sympathetic regard for human nature, cast a binding glow over the production.”  The unnamed theater reviewer for the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Time” section described the play as “a classic roundelay, but instead of romantic shenanigans the comic intrigue turns on social, financial, and political concerns.”  The review-writer dubbed the cast “eleven accomplished farceurs” and singled out Carey as Lady Knightsbridge and, especially, Sachs “as a family friend whose every line pierces the hypocrisy around him, including his own.”

On Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter, noting that Hugh Ross’s production of The Roundabout is “smoothly staged,” found the play “offers enough nutrition for a band of first-rate thespians to feast on.”  Nonetheless, Leiter felt that “it’s still second-rate Priestley, far too long and chatty . . . for its wafer-thin, drawing room/romantic comedy plot, leavened by political satire.”  The TLS blogger added, “There’s some enjoyment to be derived from Priestley’s then timely and sometimes still pertinent observations on social and economic matters, but the relatively few laughs are mostly of the polite, muffled kind,” and “the first act tends to drag . . . with no real stakes established to keep us in suspense during the intermission.”  Leiter concluded that “the resurrection of Priestley’s comedy is mainly to be recommended for its acting.”  Howard Miller of Talkin’ Broadway reminded us (as I’ve said on occasion), “Not all resurrected and dusted-off plays from yesteryear reveal themselves to be glittering lost diamonds.”  He pronounced The Roundabout “a lovely garnet or topaz,” however, labeling it “a charming and well-performed work with an undercurrent of social criticism.”  The “well-oiled ensemble . . . does a fine job of keeping the lighter-than-air domestic comedy floating stylishly and smoothly.”  Though he found The Roundabout “a parade of comic turns in a play with the barest of plots,” Miller reported that “the fine-tuned performances by the entire cast . . . raises The Roundabout above the ordinary.”  He concluded, “While The Roundabout may not exactly be a newly rediscovered treasure unearthed from the good old days, it provides enough delights to make it well worth the visit,” adding that The Roundabout “is a must-see, a surprising, sojourn into the realm of lightweight comedy.” 

Describing the play as “a drawing-room comedy . . . in the style of [W. Somerset] Maugham, [Frederick] Lonsdale or Coward but with a bit more political content,” TheaterScene’s Gluck declared that The Roundabout “now seems rather dated and beside the point” after 85 years; even Ross’s “elegant and graceful production can’t disguise the fact that the play seems to be two generations late in arriving.”  The TS reviewer observed that though “the play seems to have something to say about economics and political systems, it is simply a very light romantic comedy” and Ross’s “production is quite proficient and fast-paced, but the characters are generic and we don’t learn much about them.”  Despite its “polished production,” The Roundabout is “little more than a dated drawing room comedy” which “pretends to be making a statement about British class structure and the economic and social changes.”  The play “ is both very lightweight and very much a period piece of an earlier age,” and though the “repartee is good . . ., the play is not particularly witty nor does it offer memorable one liners.”  On CurtainUp, Simon Saltzman reported, “Incessant flippant chatter is crisply deployed along with archaic social commentary in” The Roundabout, little “more than a passing, or perhaps passably socially aware divertissement.” 

Marina Kennedy dubbed The Roundabout “a truly charming play” on Broadway World and the “comings and goings of [the] colorful characters, the clash of social classes, and the fast-paced, clever dialogue create a totally entertaining and engaging theatrical experience.”  Ross’s “staging is superb and the show’s cast shines bright”; Kennedy reported, “You’ll love the cast of The Roundabout. They are funny, lively and authentic.”  Theater Pizzazz’s Rocamora quipped, “Unearthing old theatre gems is like digging for truffles—and British director Hugh Ross has found one”—though I’m not so sure making a comparison to a fungus is especially complimentary.  Dubbing the play “a long-lost treasure,” the Theater Pizzazz review-writer asserted that it “holds the promise of an entertaining comedy of manners—but delivers far more.”  She explained, “In the midst of all [the] frivolity, playwright Priestley offers a sharp, satirical birds-eye view of an anxious era when England’s social order is changing.” 

On Theatre Reviews Limited, David Roberts asserted that “the comedic stuff” of The Roundabout is the way the characters “collide with one another in deliciously hilarious flights of fantasy all the time challenging the decorum of polite society.”  “Under Hugh Ross’s well paced direction,” the TRL reviewer found, “the cast is uniformly engaging.”  He affirmed, “It is the unpredictability of [the] parallel story lines that makes ‘The Roundabout’ consummately entertaining,” though “Priestly chooses not to explore the issues he introduces with any depth.”  Roberts concluded that the play “is a delightful romp around the roundabout well worth the trip.”  In the other notice rated a negative 45, Theatre Is Easy’s Eleanor J. Bader said in her “Bottom Line” that The Roundabout is a “comedic, but inconsequential, look at upper class decadence and Communist sympathizers in 1930s Great Britain.”  It’s “played for laughs, rather than ideas,” asserted Bader, though she found Staggles and Gurney “obnoxious” for their “relentless womanizing” and “the play’s comedic impact . . . tempered by Priestley’s positioning of Pamela, Comrade Staggles, and Kettlewell as equally deluded.”  Furthermore, Bader found “the juxtaposition” of “the idealism and utopian dreams of young Communists with  the unscrupulous behavior of Kettlewell and his business associates” “maddening.”  Her conclusion was that “The Roundabout is well acted and well staged.  I wish that were enough, but it’s not.  Despite the still-timely reference to sexual misconduct, the play is dated; despite some terrific one-liners, its assets are insufficient to recommend what is ultimately a stale production.”

The lowest Show-Score rating was the 20 received by Alix Cohen’s notice on Woman Around Town.  Characterizing the play as “[o]stensibly a lightweight drawing room satire about changing social order,” Cohen asserted, “In the hands of George Bernard Shaw, we might’ve seen the classes spar with meaningful illumination.  Were the piece by Noel Coward, then it might’ve been sharply witty.”  Instead, she complained, “we’re subjected to a tedious two hours in the hands of milquetoast Kettlewell, almost-ran Chuffy, bratty, tantrum-throwing, mischief-making Pamela, and boorish, cliché Comrade Staggles.  (Other characters are frankly negligible.)”  Of the cast, Cohen asserted that “aside from flickers, those onstage range from poor to irritating to ho-hum”; “there’s not a flicker of character definition, actors often tune out when not speaking.”  The staging “is so heavy handed,” she found, “movement has no motivation except audience view, irony goes by practically unnoticed.”  Even the set “has no attractions” and the costumes, fine for the men, are “uniformly unflattering apparel for women.”

On the Huffington Post, David Finkle announces “great news”—first, because The Roundabout “has just resurfaced” and, second, because it’s been revived “in a grand production, directed exactly as it should be by Hugh Ross and with precisely the right cast.”  Characterizing the play as “a drawing room comedy not unlike others from the period,” Finkle continued: “Nevertheless, in its way it was already accomplished, and in its way it’s now dated.”  Then the HP reviewer added, “Dated, yes, but possessing the kind of charm those plays continue to hold, rather like the perfume of faded flowers.”  Summing up, Finkle affirmed:

The true value of The Roundabout is that it’s Priestley getting laughs at the expense of the upstart English who’ve jumped on the Communist bandwagon.  To some very large extent, he’s defanging the bear-toothed threat of the age, a threat he might have taken more seriously.  But if he had, The Roundabout wouldn’t be half the fun it is, and that excuses plenty.

'Toast'

“I love work plays,” says British playwright Richard Bean (One Man, Two Guvnors).  “Work has hierarchy, hope, ambition, need, compromise, tragedy, and comedy.”  Bean has reason to know, largely from his own lived experience before turning to writing plays for a living.  “Work,” he continues, “is society touching the individual.  Work is the individual engaging in society.”  The  writer knows a little something of this aspect of human endeavor as well, as you’ll soon learn.  “Often the language is richer, saltier for sure, but also more revealing.”  And there you have three aspects of Bean’s creds as a playwright: a worker, someone familiar with the functioning of the human mind, and a writer with a practiced ear for both ordinary speech and a funny line.  All of these are manifested in his 1999 serio-comic study of men at work, Toast, in its U.S. première at 59E59 Theaters.

Richard Bean, 60 next month, was born in Hull, England, the East Yorkshire port city that’s also the home town of his younger colleague in the playwriting dodge, Tom Wells (Jumpers for Goalposts; see my report posted on 23 May 2015).  Bean’s father was a policeman and his mother was a hairdresser.  Hull, where Toast is set, is a port city of a quarter million inhabitants on the Humber Estuary, about 198 miles north of London and 61 miles east of Leeds.  (Hull has been named the U.K. City of Culture for 2017.)  After grammar school, when he was 18, Bean worked in a bread plant before leaving to study social psychology at Loughborough University in Leicestershire (108 miles southwest of Hull).  He worked as an occupational psychologist for 15 years in the personnel and training departments of factory businesses and as a stand-up comic from 1989 to 1994 before turning to playwriting; he’s said both professions have been useful to his writing, as has his life in Hull among the fishermen (Under the Whaleback, 2003) and his year at the bread factory, which became the setting for Toast. 

Coming to playwriting late in his life, he says he had “no connection with the arts” until he was 30.  “Theatre wasn’t part of my life,” Bean admits.  Having graduated with a science degree, Bean had little background in literature, so he began reading on his own after university.  “Specifically I started reading Henry Miller, [Jack] Kerouac, [John] Steinbeck, and [Joseph] Conrad—just for fun really,” the playwright explained, “but it was Henry Miller who corrupted me just through serendipity.”  Bean was working in the personnel office of a telecommunications company when he began reading Tropic of Capricorn, Miller’s account “of his life in New York and Brooklyn.”  Bean discovered that Miller, too, was employed in the personnel office of a telecommunications company—“and so, bit by bit, I started writing.”

Bean’s first attempts at writing led him into stand-up comedy.  He came to playwriting by chance, in a way, when he saw a production of David Storey’s play The Changing Room; the Naturalism of the staging was Bean’s first influence in theatrical style.  “I thought it was rather boring as I sat and watched it, and then theatre magic worked on me, I couldn’t get it out of my head, and then I realized how I might dramatize my year’s work at a mass production bread factory.”  That play became Toast. 

His work in the bread plant gave Bean more than just bread-baking stories:

The year I spent working in a factory was the best for becoming a writer because I was doing six 12 hour shifts a week standing listening to dialogue.  When you do boring factory work, if you’ve got the opportunity to talk you’re talking to entertain each other.  You go deeper and deeper and get more and more intimate.  For me that year spent working in the bakery was the best year of my life in terms of becoming a playwright.

Bean began writing plays in the early 1990s, penning some radio sketches and the libretto for an opera, Paradise of Fools (1995) by Stephen McNeff.  His first full-length play, Of Rats and Men, set in a psychology lab, was staged in 1996 at London’s Canal Cafe Theatre and went on to the Edinburgh Festival; he adapted the play for BBC Radio in 1997.  His next stage play, Bean’s first major work, was Toast in 1999, presented at the Royal Court Upstairs in London.  Since then, he’s written 25 plays, including a musical (Made in Dagenham, 2014) and his hit Broadway début, One Man, Two Guvnors, which premièred at the National Theatre’s Lyttleton Theatre in London in May 2011, directed by Nicholas Hytner, prior to going on tour in the United Kingdom before landing in London’s West End in November 2011.  It opened on Broadway in April 2012, winning the 2012 Tony for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play for James Corden and receiving six other Tony nominations; One Man also won three 2012 Drama Desk Awards and the 2012 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Broadway Play.  In 2011 Bean became the first dramatist to win the Evening Standard Award for Best Play for two plays, One Man and The Heretic.  His future plans include two new plays to be staged in Hull in 2017 as part of the City of Culture year: The Hypocrite, about Hull’s part in the English Civil War of 1642-51, and an untitled play about stand-up comedians.

Bean’s original title for Toast was Wonderloaf, which happens to be the brand name of the bread the playwright spent 12 months making in the Hull factory.  But Homepride Spillers, the bakery company, objected and set their lawyers on Bean and the play was retitled just before opening at the Royal Court.  “I still actually have a ticket with Wonderloaf printed on it,” says Bean, one of the very few left, he claims.  After the hit début at the Royal Court, Toast was revived in March 2007 at the Hull Truck Theatre in Bean’s home town.  It was remounted again in August 2014 at the Park Theatre, London, by Snapdragon Productions, which subsequently went on tour in the U.K. from February to April 2016 before coming to New York City as part of the 59E59 Theaters’ Brits Off-Broadway 2016 series from 20 April to 22 May.  (A brief profile of the 59E59 Theaters appears in my report on Summer Shorts 2015, posted on 12 August 2015.)  The production opened in Theater A on 1 May and my friend Diana and I caught it on Saturday evening, 7 May. 

In April 2004, Brits Off Broadway débuted at the 59E59 Theater under the leadership of Elysabeth Kleinhans, the theaters’ artistic director, and Scottish-born executive producer Peter Tear; this season marks the annual tradition’s twelfth year of bringing provocative British theater to the U.S.  Along with 59E59’s main offerings, the 5A Season, Brits Off Broadway is one of the three main series presented by the Off Broadway facility.  The other two are Summer Shorts (on which I reported in the post referenced above) and East to Edinburgh (see my report on Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies, 17 August 2015), both annual occurrences.  Brits Off Broadway is a festival of new works from British writers, performers, and companies, presenting between six and 12 productions in all three of 59E59’s houses during the months of April, May, and June. 

Brits Off Broadway draws presentations from across the British Isles, including the less-represented Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.  While there are shows from the National Theatre, the Bristol Old Vic, and the Leicester Haymarket Theatre, many are from small companies, from emerging and established talents alike.  “We’re bringing the stuff that would never, could never be seen on Broadway—small-scaled shows, one-person shows that deserve to find a wider audience but aren’t appropriate for commercial theaters uptown or downtown," explained Kleinhans.  59E59 scouts regularly visit Britain to select the best of British theater.  For theatergoers wary of festivals as “grab bags full of unknown, untested work,” the New York Times’ Christopher Isherwood assures them, “For Brits Off Broadway, Mr. Tear and Ms. Kleinhans have already done the hard work.  They’ve fixed the odds for you.”  In 2006, Isherwood dubbed the third festival “a highlight of the theatrical year in New York.”  

In addition to this season’s presentation of Bean’s first major work, Brits Off Broadway has offered productions of plays by such writers as Alan Ayckbourn, John Osborne, Peter Nichols, Steven Berkoff, Ian Kelly, Gary Owen from Wales, Northern Ireland’s Richard Dormer, and Scottish writer Gregory Burke; among the Brits Off Broadway productions have been numerous U.S. premières.  Casts have included such performers as two-time Oscar nominee Brenda Blethyn, Ewen Bremner, and Celia Imrie. 

Toast is set in the dirty, drab canteen (break room) of a Hull bread factory in 1975, where the workers spend their off-time.  The cast is made up of a crew of working-class men, including former trawlermen from when Hull was a busy fishing port, whose jobs are in jeopardy because the company has upgraded a newer plant over an hour’s drive away.  The owners have been neglecting the Hull bakery, which is constantly breaking down, and once it can no longer sustain its usefulness, it’ll be closed down.  (The workers don’t only have their livelihoods to worry about if the plant closes: for most of them, the factory’s what fills their days.  As one of them says, if they weren’t at work, they’d just be idle.)  Meanwhile, the workers are left alone in the bakery on a Sunday shift, as no management personnel come to the plant; as one of the workers puts it, the Hull factory’s a goldmine for the owners: “They don’t have to manage it, maintain it, or invest in it.”

The action begins as the workers assemble at the start of one Sunday-night shift.  The boss, Mr. Beckett (never seen, but the subject of shop talk and often on the other end of the occasional phone conversation), tells the shift foreman that an order went wrong earlier so the late shift will have to work until 4 a.m. baking 3,000 extra loaves of bread.  Reactions are mixed, but the men realize that the order must be filled.  As a clock above the entrance marks the time, the six bread-makers (soon joined by a seventh, the “spare wank,” whose presence as a relief worker is mandated by labor contract when a shift goes to 12 hours) come and go, either for their “half-hours” (meal break) or their “smokes” (10- or 15-minute tea breaks).  We get to know the men as they banter with one another.  (If you’re wondering where I got all that jargon and the translations, the theater kindly provides a glossary, necessary for both the work slang and the Yorkshire dialect they all speak.)

Blakey (Steve Nicolson) is the “chargehand,” the shift foreman (though he isn’t “management”), for which he’s paid a whole 10 pence more an hour than his co-workers.  Blakey must watch his back, though, because shop steward Colin (Will Barton—who vaguely resembles Walter Matthau when he played heavies) is brown-nosing Mr. Beckett.  (Is he named so resonantly because all the men are waiting for their own kind of Godot?  Is the factory canteen Bean’s industrial stand-in for a barren country road with its lone, leafless tree?)  Peter (Matt Sutton) hates his job at the bread plant but needs it badly and worries how he’ll be able to support his family if the plant closes.  Dezzie (Kieran Knowles), a former “deckie” on a fishing trawler (with disgusting stories to tell), has just moved to a new house—which has given his wife a sex drive that pleases him—and also delights Cecil (Simon Greenall) who loves to hear about it because “he isn’t getting any.”  (What else delights Cecil is goosing Peter from behind in a blitz attack.)  This leaves only the pitiable Nellie (Matthew Kelly) from the regular shift, a burnt-out shell of a man from working 80-hour weeks for 45 years (he started at the bakery when he was 14 and doesn’t expect to retire for another six years).  When the six shift-members have arrived, the “temp,” Lance (John Wark), who claims to be a mature student in social history but turns out to be very different from the articulate and well read fellow we meet at his arrival, shows up as the spare wank.

Small crises occur throughout the night—Nellie, the “mixer” (the guy who makes the dough), manages to lose his undershirt somehow and the workers have to find it lest it wind up in someone’s loaf of bread the next day—until shortly before quitting time a serious mishap takes place, threatening a shut-down of the oven.  If that occurs, it’d take eight hours for the oven to cool and another five for it to reheat.  The men’s jobs completely depend on avoiding that.  On their own, and not wanting to report the problem to Mr. Beckett until they’ve tried to fix it—even at the risk of their own lives—the seven bakery workers scramble to set things right before the shift ends.

In the course of two hours (including an intermission), Toast depicts (if you’ll pardon the pun) a slice of factory life more than a beginning-middle-and-end narrative.  The milieu’s a hermetically sealed environment, with its own customs and practices and its own language, some of it Yorkshire slang (sarnies for sandwiches, tatties for potatoes) and some of it bakery-worker jargon (spare wank, half-hour, smoke, chargehand, mixer).  It’s also a character study of sorts, except the “character” is a team, six long-time co-workers and one newcomer.  Toast shows us individuals engaging in one very specific society. 

Toast was a disappointment, however.  Not only was the New York Times review of the current production positive, but so were all the notices I looked up for various London stagings between 1999 and 2014, but the play doesn’t live up to the hype.  The acting and directing, however, are excellent (although the thick Yorkshire dialect is hard to follow).  It’s a Naturalistic play (with a hint of Pinterism), but it’s also a snapshot of one shift at a bread factory so there’s not really a plot or a theme—or a conclusion.  The shift ends, so the play just stops.  I haven’t seen any of Bean’s other work (including One Man), so I don’t know if his writing is usually this faux-documentary style—I presume his adaptations more or less follow the plots of the original sources, but I can’t guess about the others.  

I can’t argue with the truthfulness of Bean’s depiction of this world—in fact, my impression is that it’s very accurate, and certainly the performances ring true—but the play lacks dramatic impact beyond a few emotional and psychological highs that come and go without leaving much behind.  Not only do the characters generally shrug off all incidents during the shift, it’s pretty clear that there won’t be any repercussions the next day or anytime thereafter.  The only change this night, an accident really, is the introduction of Lance, who may or may not be unbalanced (he’s a patient at the De la Pole Hospital, a mental asylum), but all he manages to do is toss a few momentary surprises at a couple of the workers, unbeknownst to any of the others so there aren’t any ripples beyond the moment.  Lance doesn’t actually disrupt the night’s work, much less any of the men’s focus.  Only the prospect of the plant’s closing, throwing the men all out of work, hangs over the characters like Joe Btfsplk’s dark cloud—and it’s a rumor which may or may not happen and isn’t actually in the offing during the play, making it only a subliminal threat.

I said, though, that the Snapdragon production of Toast is excellent.  Eleanor Rhode, director of this revival from the 2014 Park Theatre presentation that went on tour around England, stages the 59E59 visit, produced in association with London’s Jagged Fence Theater, with sureness and clarity.  On James Turner’s shabby canteen set, strewn with months of tossed trash (watch the wastebasket as it overflows with used teabags) and flour, under harsh, overhead industrial lighting by Mike Robertson, Rhode creates a whole world inhabited by just six people (with the occasional temporary addition of an outsider).  We can spy bits of the rest of the baking plant through the canteen doors’ glass panels (also clouded with flour dust), but it’s a hazy, ambiguous “elsewhere” that mostly exists for us from the evocative noises contributed by sound designer Max Pappenheim; the only real place is the one room where life happens.  (For the most part, except for Lance, who wears his street clothes—a little neater and nattier than what the others arrive in—the men wear work clothes of well-used white trousers, shirts, and aprons and flour-covered workmen’s brogans.  The look was designed by Holly Rose Henshaw.) 

Even though it was difficult to follow all the Yorkshire-inflected dialogue (that’s the same region in which Downton Abbey is set, but the TV show, even among the downstairs folk, was created with a trans-Atlantic audience in mind; Bean made no concession for us monolingual Americans), believing the truthfulness of the bakery men is never in question.  (It became more effective not to struggle to catch and interpret each word or phrase but just to let the underlying intentions, nicely conveyed by the cast’s physicalizations, communicate to me.)   What these guys do and how they do it was as real for me as a cinéma verité, and the collective work among the actors, whether there are two men on stage or all seven, was actually thrilling see.  (When the six regular shift workers are alone, I had no doubt they knew each other intimately and over a long time.  Lance’s presence suitably makes the others a little hesitant.)  If the play’s composed as a picture of a certain moment in the life of the bakery, Rhode doesn’t impose a structure that Bean didn’t intend: the performance seems to unfold in its natural rhythm, just as a Sunday night shift would (if 12 hours could be compressed into two).  There are lulls, silences, and slow intervals, interrupted now and then by frenetic, high-energy interludes.  As an exercise in acting and directing, you couldn’t want a better example.

Within the ensemble, each character stands out in his own way.  Arguably the most salient is Nellie (actually Walter Nelson, but everyone call him Nellie even though he prefers Walter), compellingly played with lumbering, monosyllabic aloofness—he’s part of the shift, but he’s not one of the gang—by Matthew Kelly.  He’s the old man of the team—not so much because he’s older than everyone else (I’m not so sure he is), but because he’s worked in the plant forever, it seems, having given it his childhood, his youth, and now his middle age.  (One description of Kelly’s bakery worker that I like—because it’s both perceptive and apt—emphasized “his floury hair and doughy features resembling the bread he bakes.”)  One co-worker calculates that Nellie’s baked 220 million loaves in his time at the factory.  Nellie’s not so much a leader as the shift mascot.  Kelly, an Olivier Award–winner (for Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, 2004), plays Nellie with a mix of one part tiredness and one part resignation.  In fact, when Lance, in his first time revealing his strangeness, tells Nellie he foresees that the old mixer’s going to die tonight, Nellie’s nonplussed. 

John Wark’s Lance resembles a slimmer Josh Mostel (from the ’70s) or Wayne Knight (from the ’80s), but somewhat more troublesome.  He shifts from comically peculiar to mysterious and weird without passing through any intermediate stages—and it’s hard to tell, the first time he does his eerie bit, whether he’s some kind of other-worldly creature Bean invented to tip over the Naturalistic world he’d maintained up till then, or some kind of kook.  He pretty much kept me guessing, although on his second go I was fairly certain he was just unbalanced somehow, until Blakey supplied some missing facts.  It’s regrettable that Bean doesn’t make more use of this character, who, in the end, has little effect on the action.  Wark creates a stand-out figure in the insular world of Toast but never really gets to go anywhere with it.

The other characters on the shift, though each is delineated distinctly by both Bean’s script and the actors’ characterizations, really only exist in association with their shiftmates.  Steve Nicolson’s Blakey, who’s spent some time in jail, is hard and cheerless, with divided loyalties as the shift chargehand who’s responsible to Mr. Beckett and the company on one side and to the men of his shift who depend on him to maintain their livelihoods on the other.  As shop steward Colin, Will Barton is subtly two-faced, appearing to look out for his coworkers as fellow union men but eying Blakey’s job and the 10 p.-an-hour raise that goes with it.  Cecil is the jokester in the gang, and Simon Greenall plays him with a slight edge that made me wonder if his jokes and clowning aren’t just a might desperate, even cruel, to fill an essentially empty life.  (Cecil’s the character who says, “I’m either here or I’m fishing, and I don’t really like fishing.”)  Kieran Knowles’s former deckie Dezzie, the youngest on the team and a man with more strength than smarts (he can’t remember his new address or phone number), is focused on his new wife and new home—he’s thinking ahead to his half-hour when he plans to rush home for a few minutes with the wife—and keeps himself at a slight remove from his shiftmates.  Peter, as played by Matt Sutton, is the shift’s cynic and anti-establishmentarian who grouses about nearly everything—and is the butt of most of Cecil’s hijinks.  With long, stringy hair, he wears flared jeans (remember bellbottoms?) instead of the white work pants the other regulars wear, making him look a little like a hippie in this working-class enclave, almost as out of place as Lance.  He brings a deck of cards to work with him to pass the time on his breaks, but he’s also quick to anger and challenge Blakey to a fight. 

Show-Score, the website that tallies theater reviews, reported that 59E59’s Toast received 68% positive reviews (of 22 surveyed), 14% negative, and 18% mixed.  Overall, the site gave the production a score of 72.  (I recalculated the stats posted on the site because Show-Score included U.K. reviews of earlier presentations.  I counted only reviews of the New York performance.)  Among the highest scoring notices was Ben Brantley’s in the New York Times.  Brantley called Toast a “trenchant . . . comedy of the rhythms of a blue-collar workday” that’s “a shrewd and poignant study of how rote work defines those who perform it.”  The play, the Timesman observed, “isn’t easy to classify”: “It combines the frenzy of farce with the creeping incremental detail of kitchen-sink realism. And there’s always the sense of a desperate emptiness lurking beneath the rowdy humor.”  He reported that “as directed by Eleanor Rhode,” the play’s “acted by a vigorous cast.” In the end, Brantley declared, “Joking, teasing and roughhousing—like making bread in an assembly line—are all just diversions to keep people from thinking about the final nothingness that awaits them. . . .  That ‘Toast’ is shadowed by this awareness doesn’t keep it from being boisterously entertaining.”  In the Epoch Times, Barry Bassis called Toast “a comedy but with serious undertones” and a “winner from across the pond” that “has an air of authenticity.”  Bassis affirmed, “And the cast is superb.” 

In her brief paragraph on the production, Elisabeth Vincentelli warned in the New York Post, “Even if you loved ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ on Broadway . . .  you may want to think twice before checking out ‘Toast’” because “it’s a slog.”  “Nothing much happens,” Vincentelli complained, “and the elliptical dialogue is made even more impenetrable by the working-class northern English accents.”  The Post reviewer acknowledged, “Things marginally pick up in the second act—if you make it that far,” but then concluded, “Sadly, this loaf takes way too long to rise.”   Cautioning that Toast isn’t “for the gluten intolerant,” Alexis Soloski wrote in the U.S. edition of the Guardian, that the play’s “a flour-crusted portrait of a group of men working the weekend shift at a bread factory” that “resembles a social realist drama (with a few less successful gestures toward the preternatural).”  Toast “also displays . . . mordant and sometimes cruel humor,” observed Soloski.  “The situation is somewhat formulaic and so is the plotting,” the Guardian review-writer noted, “but Bean manages something distinctive, too, giving each of the men a distinctive voice.”  Soloski characterized the production as “finely detailed,” but demurred slightly, adding, “perhaps too finely.  The scurf of flour that coats the break room had a way of creeping up the theater’s center aisle and the factory thrum of Max Pappenheim’s sound design confused at least one patron, who asked an usher to silence the noise.”  (That never happened the night I saw the play—but it suggests how Naturalistic the staging was.)  “The performances are playful and mostly un-showy,” continued the reviewer, “and the 70s dress and hairstyles, courtesy costume designer Holly Rose Henshaw, are a slightly repulsive treat.” 

In the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” column, the reviewer noted that Bean “hymns the pleasures and the sorrows of hard work in this genial comedy.”  The notice concluded (with a good pun!), “Leavened with pungent slang and bawdy humor—the ensemble works together as smoothly as the best assembly line—the play conjures a bygone world of industrial work, as doomed to obsolescence as the bakers themselves.”  In Time Out New York, Sandy MacDonald dismissed Toast, saying that “it’s tough to drum up much interest in this 1999 throwback” as Bean “evidently learned a thing or two in the wake of this, his first play—like how to jump right into the action and not waste a good half-hour establishing character.”  MacDonald had complaints about the acting as well, asserting that “Kelly cartoonishly indicates Nellie’s fright and confusion rather than authentically embodying the emotions, so the effect comes at one remove” and that “Wark telegraphs Lance’s oddity so pointedly (abrupt tonal shifts, bugged eyes) that you’d have to be facing a clear and present threat to your livelihood not to notice that there’s something seriously amiss.”

David Finkle, Huffington Post’s “First Nighter,” putting Toast in a new subgenre he named “gang comedy-dramas,” linked Bean’s play with Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew at the Atlantic Theater Company (Sandy MacDonald made the same connection in TONY) in which “blue-collar workers gather at the rest-and-relaxation room and get caught up in their factory’s potentially shutting down.”  Toast is “a strong play for the season getting underway” and awarded “a championship bread loaf . . . to the seven character men who make up the cast” and affirmed that Bean “has the right cast, the right director in Eleanor Rhode and the right set designer in James Turner” to pull off his chronicle of “the slow death of the industrial economy in England.”  On Theater Online, Heather Violanti described the 59E59 production of Toast as “exquisite” due to “Rhode’s clear-eyed direction and the ensemble[‘]s sincere, never-indulgent performances” which “bring Bean’s prodigious work to brilliant, heartfelt life.”  The play’s focus is “on the hard realities of working class,” though “Bean wraps up the play’s conflicts a little too neatly.”  Nonetheless, “the richly drawn, empathetic characters and expertly observed sense of workplace dynamics keep the play compelling.”  The company creates “an effortless, finely observed sense of ensemble” by which “you believe these men have been working together for years.”  In conclusion, Violanti dubbed Toast “a not-to-be-missed production” and punned that it’s “perhaps the toast of this year’s Brits Off Broadway festival.”

Susan Hasho of Theater Pizzazz affirmed, “The pace of this play is slow and the payoff might seem subtle, except that this production affords a feast of notable character actors, in perfect ensemble, performing small, detailed moments beautifully full of life and significance.”  Toast “[s]lowly . . . reveals the idiosyncratic connections between the men and the hopeless strain they are under” as Bean “creates a microcosm in which we can see a world of despair” while “the humor in the play humanizes the plight in both stark and gentle ways.”  The TP reviewer asserts that “as an audience,” we “are gathered into this life by the pace and the intricacy of the characters and their relationships.”  On TheaterScene, Rachel Goddard thought that Bean “allows the audience” for Toast “to be the fly on the wall of a bread factory break room”  Toast “is full of humor with moments of intense drama,” asserted Goddard, “[w]ith ingenuously boorish and precisely written characters” portrayed by “a strong ensemble cast.”  Characterizing Rhode’s direction as “brilliant,” TheaterScene’s reviewer felt, “Overall the performances were impressive and gave a slightly stagnant plot, life and motion.”

Asya Danilova of the blog OnStage felt that the audience of Toast “truly feels as though they are traveling in space and time” to the time and place of the play’s setting.  But “Toast is often unpredictable,” warned the reviewer. The canteen set, wrote Danilova, “is meticulously buil[t] and painfully realistic” and Pappenheim’s soundscape “is as subtle as it is scrupulous.”  The “brilliant cast . . . delivers some warm and gentle comedy,” though Danilova refused to call the play either a comedy or a “workplace drama.”  She didn’t put a label on Toast, but described it “as a tapestry of charismatic bread factory workers dealing with the crisis and enjoy it this way.”  The OnStage blogger summed up with: “But to me the most interesting experience was being caught when I wanted plot ‘candy’, that metaphysical twist, and didn’t quite get it.  Instead of that I got more ‘bread’, the everyday peoples’ collisions.  The bread is more nutritious than candy though.  When it’s made just right it’s the greatest food you can have.”  On Broadway World, Marina Kennedy described Toast as “a humorous, yet intensely realistic depiction of factory life” through which Bean was able “to capture his subject perfectly.”  The production’s “stellar cast” delivers “a collective performance that is absolutely compelling” which, Kennedy thought, makes “an entertaining and appealing show that brings a real sense of humanity to the stage.” 

Stage Buddy’s Tania Fisher declared, “If you’re a fan of British theater and want to enjoy some fine acting, then you may want to help yourself to a slice of Toast.”  Fisher called Toast a “quirky play” that “tells the amusing story of an English bread factory in 1975” and generates “a strong sense of ensemble among the all-male cast” who “portray fully-realized characters with great skill and talent”; designer Turner’s set “reaches new heights in its impeccable attention to detail.”  Though our Stage Buddy found the first act “rather slow paced,” she reported that act two was “faster paced.”  Troubles with the Yorkshire accent and “the British sense of humor” aside, Fisher concluded that “it is easy to warm to every character in this offbeat story.”  CurtainUp’s review-writer Charles Wright characterized Toast as “a slice-of-life comedy about hardships on the bottom rung of the industrial ladder” whose “seven actors, under director Eleanor Rhode, are giving performances as balanced and precise as a top-flight chamber-music ensemble.”  Toast’s “physical world,” as envisioned by Turner and Robertson, “is sunless and grime-encrusted, with a dusting of flour” and “just right,” asserted Wright, “and entirely believable.” 

[What you don’t get from my review survey above—because I didn’t quote all the attempts at humor—are the myriad puns on bread and baking that nearly every reviewer slipped into his or her notice.  (I did it, too, a little, but I yield the field to the many other writers who outstripped my poor efforts.)  Some plays just seem to lend themselves to that sort of writing—just as Something Rotten!, on which I just reported (14 May), called the review-writers to come up with musical-related and Shakespeare-oriented quips—and a play about baking bread is just too much of a temptation to resist.  Some puns were better than others, of course.  I guess some writers just rose to the occasion and others simply fell flat.  (Sorry.  Couldn’t help myself)]