A wretched, stinking, mouldy, crumbling slice of old Glasgae toon has dropped on to the Lyttelton stage. Ena Lamont Stewart’s play, Men Should Weep, is an enthralling act of homage to her slum childhood and it follows the travails of the Morrison family, all nine of them, wedged into two filthy rooms in Glasgow’s east end.
A wretched, stinking, mouldy, crumbling slice of old Glasgae toon has dropped on to the Lyttelton stage. Ena Lamont Stewart’s play, Men Should Weep, is an enthralling act of homage to her slum childhood and it follows the travails of the Morrison family, all nine of them, wedged into two filthy rooms in Glasgow’s east end.
The play takes a while to ensnare your loyalty. The first act is a slack and linear piece of documentary reportage. Only in the second half do the threads tighten into a proper drama. In a way, the slums seem surprisingly prosperous. The images of grinding destitution are overdone. This isn’t the underclass. It’s the squeezed middle without three crucial modern amenities: contraception, antibiotics and a sense of interior décor. Give these crowded flats a coat of fresh paint and they could be a yuppie high-rise.
Respectability is a shared aim. Affluence isn’t just a far-off ambition but a reality, at least in the wardrobe department. Every character has one decent outfit. At weekends the girls dye their hair and dress like film goddesses in heels, frocks, jewels and make-up. Young gents have well-cut suits. If you lined up a dozen Gorbals youths in their best clothes you’d have a Bullingdon photograph. So the snappers who visited the tenements were photo-unrealists deliberately overselling the squalor by banishing stylish youngsters from the frame and bringing in drunks, chimneysweeps, rickety bone-bags and starving one-eyed beggars with pneumonia. Should we be surprised? Not really. The market for those photos, like the market for this play, is the pampered bourgeoisie, not the flea-ridden untouchables.
The Morrison family is dominated by its toiling materfamilias, Maggie. In Glasgow it was the norm for women to rule the household. The alternative is subtly revealed to us in a half-glimpsed neighbour’s flat where a pregnant wife has lost control of her drunken husband and gets a walloping every night just after closing time. The quickfire dialogue of the Morrison women flashes and fizzes with insults and putdowns and there are moments of tender comedy, too. One ageing biddy remembers her first cinema date where she was so excited she didn’t notice her toffees were silver-wrapped till she was halfway through them.
Josie Rourke, in her first directorial outing at the National, has created an exceptional ensemble piece. Sharon Small’s Maggie is a fine portrayal of martyred drudgery and her principled virtue is nicely contrasted with the idleness of her daughter-in-law, a bored and adulterous minx played with exquisitely sexy slovenliness by Morven Christie. Even better is Sarah MacRae making her stage debut as the beautiful and rebellious daughter, Jenny. Rangily athletic, she prowls the stage with wrathful truculence like a punk supermodel, berating her father’s weakness, denouncing her filthy job as a grocer’s assistant and finally stalking off through a slammed door to make a new life for herself. The programme notes carry a headshot of this young actress as a composed and thoughtful blonde but on stage she acquires ferocious new shades of menace and passion. Her look is exceptionally powerful and attractive, hollowed-out yet curvaceous, blooming and bursting with dangerous energies, the face of a voluptuous serpent.
This is a great production of a seldom-performed classic which deserves a permanent place in the repertoire. Its revival is a terrific act of vision by the National. And let’s not forget Bunny Christie’s sumptuously dismal set. It makes you hold your nose on sight.
Another revival at the Garrick. When We Are Married, by J.B. Priestley, is a comedy with a simple premise. In a Yorkshire mill town in 1908 three prosperous couples celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary discover that their nuptials were overseen by an unlicensed vicar. They’re all still single. Cue three varieties of marital earthquake.
As the curtain rose on Simon Higlett’s set — a carnival of chocolate-brown Edwardiana — a round of applause erupted. This was a worrying sign. It suggested nervous spectators signalling enjoyment to whoever bought their ticket. Nonetheless, this is a superb show. Maureen Lipman is a treat as a blousy shrew reduced to a scared puppy by the abolition of her social status. And the estimable Michele Dotrice (‘ooh Betty’ from Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em) shines as a put-upon doormat who heroically rises up against her ‘dull, dreary, stingy’ spouse. The script cleverly blends knockabout comedy with genuine pathos but it has some structural imperfections. A Blackpool tart arrives in Act III, and her implied affairs with two of the husbands go unexplained. Her function is to sing a few songs and add a bit of Vaudevillian uplift in injury time. Sam Kelly, the show’s outstanding feature, gives another magical performance. Billed as a comedian, Kelly operates as a minstrel. His presence is a song you can’t help but follow wherever it leads.
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