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Sunday 7 September 2008

The big sleep

Small Change
Donmar

War and Peace, I and II
Hampstead

Oh my God. Did that really happen? I knew nothing about Peter Gill’s 1976 play, Small Change, before arriving at the Donmar to see this revival under the author’s own direction. It’s a love letter, an immensely detailed and spectacularly superficial account of the working-class experience as related by four dimwits living and whingeing in south Wales. It may be a script but it isn’t a drama. Screeds of Dylanesque poetic observation are interrupted by shouting matches. There’s no story, nothing at stake for the characters, no suspense at all, just a pair of brainless rowdies and their battleaxe mums splurging out wordy tosh about their hopes and feelings and their thwarted this, that and the other.

The dialogue is crammed with contrived repetitions which I suspect are intended to resemble chamber music. This adds to the sense of portentous irrelevance. Extraordinary, the effect it all had. I’m used to the odd sleeper in the theatre but this was like a display of comic statuary. So many succumbed to the gift of Hypnos that the incredulous alert were nudging each other and laughing. At one point it just got silly. In front of me two greying heads lolled forward, the person on my left had started dribbling into my breast pocket, and the one on my right, a friendly reviewer, was my only waking neighbour. A few minutes later even this arbiter of taste had sunk Lethewards although I was amused to hear my pal in the interval gushing at a colleague, ‘The relationships! So true!’, before catching a bit more kip in act two. On the plus side, the show uses no props and no set (apart from four chairs and a shelf), and the cast wear their own clothes so there must be lots left in the Donmar kitty. Next time they can afford to put on a play.

Shared Experience, in another daft act of worship, have decided to dramatise War and Peace. To condense the greatest of all novels and bring it to the stage without being laughed out of the country is already something. To do this and to retain the scale, the grandeur, the romance, the heroism, the horror, the tragedy and the sense of redemption and hope is an achievement that flirts with the miraculous. This isn’t just a summary of the book but a commentary on it too.

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