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The Circle -
Tour
Playwright - W Somerset Maugham
Director - Mark Rosenblatt
Designer - Tim Shortall
Lighting Designer - Ben Ormerod
Sound Designer - Tom Lishman
Costume Supervisor - Alistair McArthur
Company - TEG Productions in association with The Yvonne Arnaud
Theatre Company with an Oxford Stage Company production
Cast see end of review
Venue - King's Theatre Edinburgh 0131 529 6000
New Secure 72 hr email booking + info available at www.eft.co.uk
Dates & Times - 8 -12 Oct at 7:30pm Mats Wed & Sat
at 2:30pm
Continues on tour Venues & Dates - see end of review
Seen to review at King's Theatre Edinburgh 12 Oct
Run Time - hours mins with without 15 mins interval
Reviewer - Thelma Good
A revival not to be missed.
It's a delight to see a play which fits between other classics so you
can sense a line of influence. In Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
and A Woman Of No Importance (1893), you have precursors to The Circle,
and after it Coward's Private Lives (1930) and Rattigan's The Deep Blue
Sea (1952). This, Somerset Maughan's most successful play, was first performed
in 1921. It has a lot of wit in it, more tempered than Wilde's, for Maughan
more than twenty years later could be more direct. This revival is also
a delight, performed in a well suggested stately drawing room set where
doors and empty picture frames are positioned against black walls. The
garden backcloth, seen through and around the hanging frames, has a Watteau-like
landscape with a man-made folly. It's a set which allows the play to breath
theatrically and explore other man- and woman- made follies.
This production has such a strong cast. Returning to the house she left
30 years ago, Wendy Craig's sumptuously costumed Catherine (Kitty),
is a woman who yielded to her heart back then and now conceals a terrible
emptiness. But frivolous though Kitty is, she has gained wisdom and Craig
gives us Kitty's brave soul. Her son Arnold, abandoned aged five along
with his father by her, is the earnest English gentleman who married to
be secure at home. He's a rising MP and obsessive about things being in
their place, and he doesn't want to get unseated like his father. Dale
Rapley has him to the precise T, Arnold's a man who can only get emotional
under extreme pressure.
Arnold's wife is 25 year old Elizabeth, a sweet but bored young thing,
3 years on there are no pattering tiny feet, as her Hattie Morahan
reveals she has considerable skill. William Backhurst's Teddy (Edward)
has arrived to join the house party while he waits to go back to FMS (Federated
Malay States)- he's a tea planter. He handles a tennis ball as if he
was about to play cricket, you see him swept off into something he didn't
expect he would bowl for. As Clive Champion-Cheney, the husband Kitty
walked out on, Jeremy Child has the older charmer to the manner
born. Clive's the one whose got his life sorted, how we finally find out
and it's a diamond solution. Hughie, Lord Porteous, Tony Britton
(another accomplished veteran of the stage and screens), who could have
risen to the very top of the political ladder, took Kitty off to Florence
to live in sin but now he's back with her. It's going to be quite a weekend,
and Maughan has these six going through their emotional baggage so that
the three acts fly by and you are kept guessing to the end.
As well as wit there's some very telling and still relevant things to
say about women and the men who love them, who they may or may not love
in return, living in sin or in marriage and the effect of scandal on private
and political life. The inequality of women then and a suggestion that
only when women were as financially independent as the men they married
could relationships be better balanced - a state of affairs we still find
hard to achieve. In the month when we find ex-MPs (and a PM) acknowledging
their past amours it's clear in British public affairs ( or should that
be pubic?) nothing changes that much, even though divorce is easier and
marriage is less entered into and more frequently exited out of than in
the 1920s. We still like Elizabeth wrestle with that nasty question, "Why
does our happiness have to depend on someone else's unhappiness."
And this play gives you lots more to wrestle with as well as the laughter
and wit. A revival not to be missed.
© Thelma Good 8 October 2002. - Published on EdinburghGuide.com
Cast:
Lady Catherine Champion-Cheney - Wendy Craig
Lord Porteous - Tony Britton
Clive Champion-Cheney - Jeremy Child
Elizabeth - Hattie Morahan
Edward - William Buckhurst
Arnold - Dale Rapley
Anna Shenstone - Barbara Kirby
Butler - Knight Mantell
George, The Footman - John Witts
Oxford Stage Company's production of The Circle
Tour begins
27 - 31 Aug at Malvern The Festival Theatre
3 -14 Sept at Guilford Yvonne Arnaud Theatre
23 - 28 Sept at Bath Theatre Royal
8 - 12 Oct at Edinburgh Kings Theatre
14 - 19 Oct at London Greenwich Theatre
21 - 26 Oct at Cambridge Arts Theatre
Tour ends For more info call
Magenta Partnership on 020 7323 2355
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