PHILIP OSMENT
Playwright
and theatre director
Contents
Plays
TELLING
TALES, (Gay Sweatshop)
THIS ISLAND'S MINE (Gay Sweatshop)
Published by Methuen in Gay Sweatshop:Four plays and a company Edited by Philip Osment
WHO'S BREAKING? (Commissioned and produced by Red Ladder, productions by Pilot Theatre Company, M6, Neti Neti.)
LISTEN (commissioned by Theatre Centre, production by Red Ladder)
SLEEPING DOGS (Red Ladder)
THE DEARLY BELOVED; (Cambridge Theatre Company)
Published by Methuen Philip Osment:Plays One
and Samuel French
WHAT I DID IN THE HOLIDAYS (Cambridge Theatre Company)
Published by Methuen Philip Osment:Plays One and Samuel French
THE UNDERTAKING, (commissioned and produced by Gay Sweatshop, produced at Dublin Theatre Festival and on tour in Ireland by Quare Hawks)
Published by Oberon Books
FLESH AND BLOOD (commissioned and produced by Method and Madness)
Published by Methuen Philip Osment:Plays One and Samuel French
WISE GUYS (co-commissioned and produced by Theatre Centre and Red Ladder, produced by MUZtheatre, Holland; Contact Theatre, Manchester.)
BURIED ALIVE
(commissioned by Method and Madness, to be co-produced by Hampstead
Theatre and Plymouth Theatre Royal Spring 2001)
Published by Oberon Books
LITTLE VIOLET AND THE ANGEL (co-commissioned by Theatre Centre
and MacRobert Theatre to open Sherman Theatre, Cardiff May 2001)
Published by Oberon Books
LEAVING (commissioned by Quare Hawks, Ireland)
COLLATERAL DAMAGE (With Mike Alfreds and students from LAMDA
Favorite Links
alanbrodie.com
Contact List/Agent
Agent
E-mail address
Web address
http://freespace.virgin.net/pg.o/index.htm
.
Current Projects
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
with The London Academy of Music and
Dramatic Art
Leaving
Little Violet And The Angel (Theatre Centre)
http://www.littleviolet.co.uk/
Buried Alive (Plymouth Theatre Royal and
Hampstead Theatre)
Insert project title
Biographical Information
Philip Osment acted with companies such as Gay Sweatshop and Shared Experience and then went on to work as a director and writer - until 1989 he was an artistic director of Gay Sweatshop directing POPPIES, COMPROMISED IMMUNITY and his own play THIS ISLAND’S MINE.
His three plays set in Devon where he grew up were performed by Cambridge Theatre Company (aka Method and Madness). These were all nominated for Writers Guild awards and THE DEARLY BELOVED won the award for best regional play in 1993. He has also written and directed plays aimed at young audiences for Theatre Centre and Red Ladder; directed at the National Theatre Studio (THE NIGHT GARDEN by Lin Coghlan); developed and directed a Romanian/British co-production (WITH LOVE FROM NICOLAE by Lin Coghlan) which was performed at Bristol Old Vic and on tour in England and Romania. He regularly works as a writer’s friend/dramaturg for a wide range of companies and organisations.
In 2000 he directed a production of WOYZECK for Graeae Theatre Co; his play WISE GUYS was the inaugural production at the new Contact Theatre in Manchester in February (nominated for Manchester Evening News Best New Play award and TMA Best Children and Young People’s Production); the Quare Hawks production of his play THE UNDERTAKING toured Ireland; he co-directed a Trinidadian play (CLEAR WATER) for BITE (Barbican International Festival); his play for children LITTLE VIOLET AND THE ANGEL was co-winner of the Peggy Ramsay Award.
In 2001 his fourth play for Method and Madness, BURIED ALIVE (first performed in March 1999) was revived at Plymouth Theatre Royal (March) and Hampstead Theatre (April); he directed Lorca’s BLOOD WEDDING for Graeae; and his own production of LITTLE VIOLET AND THE ANGEL opened at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff
In 2002 his play LEAVING about young male suicide was produced by QUARE HAWKS, Ireland, opening at The Garage Theatre, Monaghan on May 4th prior to a tour.
In 2002/3 he devised COLLATERAL DAMAGE a play about the Oklahoma City Bombing with Mike Alfreds and students from LAMDA
Directing Work
2001 BLOOD WEDDING
(Graeae Theatre Company)
LITTLE VIOLET AND THE ANGEL (Theatre Centre)
2000 CLEAR WATER at
the Barbican Pit
WOYZECK Graeae Theatre Company
1997-98 WITH LOVE FROM NICOLAE by Lin Coghlan
(Bristol Old Vic, on tour in Britain and Romania)
1996 THE NIGHT GARDEN at the Royal National Theatre Studio
1994 BRETEVSKI STREET (Theatre Centre)
1993-1994 Two productions of SLEEPING DOGS (Red Ladder)
1992 TWELFTH NIGHT (Drill Hall Arts Centre)
1991 LISTEN (Theatre Centre)
TIBETAN INROADS by Stephen Lowe with students at Manchester Poly School of Drama
1990-91 THE DEATH OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE by Noel Greig (Drill Hall)
1990 THIS ISLAND’S MINE with students at Rose Bruford
1989 A FEELING IN MY BONES by Lin Coghlan (Theatre Centre)
1988 THIS ISLAND’S MINE (Gay Sweatshop)
1986-87 COMPROMISED IMMUNITY (Gay Sweatshop)
1985 POPPIES by Noel Greig (Gay Sweatshop)
1984 One person shows by Rose Bruford Students
1980-82 FEARS AND MISERIES; COMING UP; ANGELS DESCEND ON PARIS with Rose Bruford Students
Reviews
Wise Guys
The Dearly Beloved
LITTLE VIOLET AND THE ANGEL
What I Did In the
Holidays
Flesh And Blood
Who’s Breaking?
Sleeping Dogs
Listen
This Island’s Mine
Buried Alive
Collateral Damage
Collateral
Damage
By Philip Osment
Directed by Mike Alfreds
Devised with students from LAMDA
December 5th-11th 2003 MacOwan Theatre, Logan
Place, London W8 6QN
On April 19th 1995 a bomb ripped
apart the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people
amongst them 19 children.
Unlike
the events of September 2001 in New York, the young man who claimed sole
responsibility for the atrocity was in many ways an all American boy - a
decorated veteran of the first Gulf War. He referred to the casualties as
"collateral damage" using a term coined by General Schwarzkopf during
Desert Storm for Iraqi civilian deaths.
The
explosion had repercussions, which reached far into the community - shattering
lives and affecting people not directly involved. The responses were often
unexpected and shocking.
The play
offers a panoramic view of people attempting to com to terms with the effects
of the bombing . An exploration of a peculiarly American response to terror.
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A study in violence
Philip Osment's new play, about the Oklahoma bombing, is a learning experience for both the audience and the students who collaborated in its creation, says Daniel Rosenthal
04 December 2003
In Philip Osment's new play, Collateral Damage, four notorious killers stand in wire cages at a maximum-security jail in Colorado, pumping iron and discussing their crimes. They are Timothy McVeigh, soon to be executed for the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, and the Cuban gang leader Luis Felipe.
Bringing them together sounds like a dramatist's conceit - as though Osment had set out to blend one of Terry Johnson's imagined theatrical encounters with the political rigour of David Edgar - but this quartet really did occupy adjacent isolation cells for their one hour of daily recreation at the Supermax jail, in Florence, Colorado, in 2001, and their four dramatised conversations provide some of the most riveting moments in Collateral Damage, as McVeigh denounces the "tyranny" of the US government, the paranoid Kaczynski rails against "a system that doesn't allow us to see how things really are", Yousef attacks the hypocrisy of US foreign policy and Felipe questions the sanity of the other three.
The play has its first public performances this week, more than 18 months after Osment and the director Mike Alfreds began working with their vast cast: 26 drama students from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda). They were brought together for The Long Project, a Lamda initiative that gives students a precious opportunity to create a piece of new work with an experienced writer, instead of spending all their time exploring the classics or reviving recent plays.
The project has already been the nursery for two recent National Theatre successes. Adapter-director Di Trevis worked with Lamda students as she began transforming Harold Pinter's unfilmed screenplay of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past into the play first performed at the Cottesloe in 2000, and Mark Ravenhill developed the first version of his time-hopping tale of sex and sexuality, Mother Clapp's Molly House, at Lamda before it was taken up by Nicholas Hytner (Ravenhill will return for the academy's 2004-5 Long Project).
"The Long Project is part of an attempt to reinvent drama schools and make them a professional resource instead of the inward-looking institutions that they used to be," says Peter James, Lamda's principal since 1994. "I had looked at companies like Complicité and realised that they disappear into a room with an idea and come out three months later with a show. I thought we could do something similar, and give our students additional responsibility for the research and writing of a piece as well for as its performance."
Ravenhill, Trevis and Osment have, in effect, been commissioned by James as they would be by an artistic director, but without the usual obligation to deliver a finished script for immediate or imminent production. "We all sit down after the first three months and ask: 'Is there further life in this?'" James explains. "If we agree that there isn't, then the project can be called off without noticeable damage; we would just pick an existing play for the students to do instead."
Osment and Alfreds appreciated this pressure-free arrangement because, although they had collaborated on four of Osment's plays, most recently Buried Alive, a harrowing tale of domestic abuse and murder, brilliantly staged by Alfreds at the Hampstead Theatre in 2001, they had never attempted a devised piece. "We weren't sure we could work that way together," says Osment, "and it was wonderful to find out that we could."
They found their subject early in 2002, after hearing a radio interview with Bud Welch, whose 23-year-old daughter, Julie, died in the Oklahoma bombing. "He talked about his journey from hatred to reconciliation and his friendship with McVeigh's father and sister," says Osment. "That was our inspiration." At first, Alfreds says, they had no idea which aspects of the Oklahoma story they would focus on: "The play could've been about capital punishment, about Waco, about the first Gulf War, about the nature of terrorism..." These were the topics researched by the students over their long vacation last year, and their homework fed into six weeks of afternoon workshops in the autumn term. Characters were created and scenes improvised, with Osment rewriting, editing and shaping the results into scripted form.
By late January, Collateral Damage was ready to be performed as a work-in-progress for an invited audience at the MacOwan Theatre, Lamda's studio venue in west London, and the result was 90 minutes of sober, moving and intelligent ensemble drama, split into more than 30 scenes and staged with stark fluency.
Its chronological spine is McVeigh's journey, from his hero's return to the US after the first Gulf War, through his seething resentment at the government's responsibility for the massacre at Waco, and on to the Oklahoma bombing, his imprisonment, trial and execution.
Branching out from the McVeigh scenes are the stories of his victims. The real-life characters include McVeigh's brother and sister and Welch, who passes from vindictive, alcohol-fuelled hatred (he tells his daughter's ghost: "I want to peel McVeigh's skin from his body, inch by inch"), to the hard-won acceptance ("I realised that if they kill Tim that won't make me feel any better") that prompted him to campaign against the bomber's death sentence. The imagined roles include bereaved Oklahomans, a TV news journalist reporting from the bomb site and the wife of an Oklahoma cop who is desperate to connect with the atrocity even though it has not touched her directly. Together, they embody the play's title and trace what Alfreds calls "the endless emotional ripples that radiate out from an event like Oklahoma".
In an impressive cast, there were stand-out performances from Laura Dos Santos, as a Waco survivor who delivers a haunting monologue, Aidan Clooke, who turns Felipe into a close relative of Al Pacino's Tony Montana in Scarface, all crotch-grabbing swagger and pitch-perfect Latino accent, Michael Diskint as the numbed Welch and Chris Jamba, who endows McVeigh with a fanatic's thousand-yard stare and unnerving calm.
Though Collateral Damage ends with McVeigh's execution in June 2001, it's impossible not to view the play through post-September 11 eyes, and to be reminded of how the al Qa'ida attacks relegated Oklahoma from America's worst terrorist atrocity almost to the status of an historical footnote. "Lots of Americans came to see the play in January and said: 'We'd forgotten about Oklahoma,'" recalls Alfreds.
Since January, the second Gulf War and the ongoing terrorist attacks around the world can only have enhanced Collateral Damage's pertinence and I strongly recommend going along to see the same cast perform a slightly revised version at the MacOwan Theatre this week, in what may well be its only London production. "Very few professional theatres could even conceive of doing the play with 26 actors: it's just too expensive," Alfreds acknowledges. "And if you were do it with eight to 10 actors and everyone doubling or trebling [their parts] then it would be a totally different experience."
Osment won't mind if this is the end of the play's life, because "this is what we've ended up with using this group and we're very proud of it", but suspects that he may return to the subject matter. "What's not clear to me yet is whether there's a different piece of work within Collateral Damage that focuses more on one story. It could just be about McVeigh and the other prisoners, or it could be three different plays about different groups, which you could watch consecutively."
As for the students, James hopes they will cherish what may turn out to have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience, because they could graduate next summer, enjoy regular, high-profile work on stage and screen for years to come, and yet never workon another new play. "I hope this has taught them that the biggest buzz of all comes from creating a role in a new play," he says. "There's nothing like it."
'Collateral Damage' is at the MacOwan Theatre, Logan Place, London W8 (020-8834 0500) tomorrow to 11 December
Wise
Guys
8 Festival Wednesday
The Scotsman, 26 August 1998
THE MAIN EVENT
Straight to the heart of
male violence
Wise Guys
St Bride’s
Theatre
Three lads, trapped
in the urban jungle and given little or no guidance by ineffectual, absentee or
abusive adults, resort to petty crime, violence, drugs and clubbing. Haven’t we
been down this gritty road before? Many times. But this grim yet often funny
co-production by two British young people’s companies — Red Ladder and Theatre
Centre — pours vital new theatrical blood into the old bottle of
socially-conscious drama.
Antony
McBride directs Philip Osment’s taut, non-preachy script at breakneck speed,
yet no behavioural or physical nuances are sacrificed. McBride elicits
devastatingly good performance from Eugene Salleh, Paul Simpson. Neil Thornton
and, as the narrative anchor, Craig Cheetham. Their corporal skill and
emotional assurance are heart-stopping, whether they’re playing angry youths or
authority figures. In negotiating the shifting dynamics of their young
characters, they simply never make a false move.
Credit for the use of
slow-motion action and scene freezes should probably be shared with movement
director Lea Parkinson. And Mary Robson’s set — basically two fenced platforms
— is a marvel of expressive, user-friendly economy. The performance leaves you
elated but shaken, wondering if there is any hope of subverting the destructive
force inside similar baby Goodfellas Out
in the real world. Can the all-too-common cycle of male brutality be broken?
Osment eschews easy answers, just as McBride’s fiercely committed cast avoids
caricature. Wise Guys is a late entry
on the Fringe. Work this beautiful deserves a large audiences
Donald Hutera -
Ends 29 August
The Dearly Beloved
Published
by Methuen Philip Osment:Plays One and Samuel French
THEATRE: A young British playwright shows considerable promise
On course towards Chekhovia
The Dearly Beloved
Hampstead
THE
original Alaric was a
Visigoth who rampaged through Rome in 410 AD. The podgy Englishman who inherits
his name in Philip Osment’s The Dearly
Beloved is more modestly destructive. He is a television director who comes
on a visit to his mother’s house in the West Country, inadvertently
intensifying the tensions already there, accidentally killing his young cousin,
and generally adding bite to as sensitively written a piece as I’ve seen in
ages. It would be going it a bit to call Osment the Gibbon of Bude, Frome, or
wherever the play is set; but he chronicles the disasters of small-town life
with insight and care.
He has more
in common with Alan Ayckbourn and Mike Leigh than with the dramatist he
half-openly acknowledges as an influence; but there is no disgrace in not yet
being Chekhov, not when you are only in your thirties. In any case, Osment’s
main debt is to his own observing eye. Everyone in Mike Alfreds’s production
comes to life:
Marlene
Sidaway’s Mum, with her plodding truisms; Peter Wight’s Alaric, who provokes
the same strong reactions as Chekhov’s Trigorin, and suffers from the same
self-doubts; Veronica Roberts as Alaric’s old girlfriend, a primary-school
head ill at ease in both her unglamorous job and her lesbian relationship with
a social services-driver, cheerily played by Annie Hayes; Pamela Moiseiwitsch’s
Elaine, unhappily married and, in her flummoxed way, a magnet for the men
onstage.
Prime among
these is John Gillett’s Barton, who is the kind of vet James Herriot might have
created had he been writing sub-Strindbergian tragedy, not pastoral comedy. He
is already at war with his wife (Sally Knyvette) for the allegiance of their
only child, a bashful drop-out who aspires to be a pop musician, and is further
enraged at the impact Alaric has on both her and the alluring Elaine.
Disappointment is everywhere in the play, and envy and anger are never far
below its surface; but Barton is by some way their most violent exponent. And
the eventual victim of his frustration is his son Man (Lucien Taylor), whom he
mocks, physically attacks, yet has not the authority to prevent going on a
fatal drive with a tipsy Alaric.
The actors,
members of the Cambridge Theatre Company, are near- flawless; but the play
does have limitations. Osment sometimes displays an unnecessary mistrust of
his own skill and his audience’s intelligence by italicizing character traits.
He makes too little of a figure given misleading emphasis at the beginning,
Alaric’s mentally handicapped brother (Sam Cox). The characters’
philosophisings about everything from Britain’s fin-de-siècle ennui to reincarnation
can come across as self-consciously Chekhovian. So can the moments — Barton
talking of his hopes for Man, for instance — when apparent crustacea suddenly
reveal a vulnerability within.
Yet
authentic Chekhovian virtues are there too. Osment seems able to see his people
from both outside and inside, to record their fluctuating feelings for each
other both in and beneath the words, and to do so with sympathy and humour. He
even manages the darkening of tone that Matt's death demands, spinning his
most touching scene out of his trickiest material. Alaric, fresh from prison,
meets Matt’s parents at Christmas in the graveyard. Will there be a sentimental
reconciliation or a vindictive row, now Barton has his enemy at his mercy?
Something in between: an embarrassed, unaggressive, but not quite forgiving
encounter that suggests that all parties have grown. A dramatist who can
embrace the pain and irony of that is clearly one with a future.
BENEDiCT
NIGHTINGALE
What I Did In The Holidays
Published by Methuen Philip Osment:Plays One
and Samuel French
EVENING STANDARD
26.4.95
Nick Curtis
IN PHILIP Osment’s wonderfully dense and detailed study of fraught farm
life in rurally non-swinging Britain, two Scottish visitors provoke a series
of revelations that leave young Morley’s family in tatters. But as Osment’s
play — acted with great sensitivity by Mike A]freds’s Cambridge Theatre ensemble
— suggests, the family was always in tatters: they just never admitted it.
Morley is the youngest brother of favoured, undereducated Rob and downtrodden
Eileen and half-brother to the self contained Frank, whose father was a German
POW. With their whimsically indulgent mother away, this quartet is stuck with
paterfamilias George, an emotional miser desperately trying to shoreup the
interwoven, crumbling fabrics of his family and his farm.
When shifty Glaswegians Cathy and Andy are co-opted as farmhands, new
ties are formed and secrets, new and old, revealed. The emotional landscape of
the play shifts and quakes, but at the end little has changed.
Osment’s characters are beautifully nuanced, neither demonised nor
idolised —Morley is a bit of a brat, and flawed George has a rough charm. The
play, therefore, charts a painfully funny path through the casual, everyday
cruelties inflicted by the thoughtless young and the selfish old regardless of
family ties. Even the unlikely tale of Cathy and Andy, who are hitching away
from a taboo secret, is told with refreshing depth and empathy.
Alfreds’s ensemble acts with a rare natura]ness and conviction that is
irresistibly involving. Poignant, gently powerful and deftly, tragicomically
funny, Osment’s play is a delight, and serves as a reminder that Mike Alfreds is one of our finest directors.
TIME OUT
19.4.95
Simon Reade
The age of Profumo, 007 and
Sputnik—and a leaky-roofed Devon farmstead, resisting the future. We see this
world through the wide eyes of youngest brother Morley who, in this last summer
before starting grammar school, plays the fool: telling the truth as it is, as
he inconveniently sees it. It’s his rite of passage, torn between lipstick and
sparkly earrings or skinning rabbits and Westerns. He sees that growing up is
about subterfuge, adulthood one big lie. His petulant half-brother Frank
escapes by reducing life to the lyrics of the latest release. Sister Eileen
pretends to be proper, playing mother, but delights in her own prurience. And
brother Rob, inculcated with more brawn than brain, is none the less a victim
of his own tender heart.
We see this family through the eyes
of two Glaswegian hitch-hikers on the run, outsiders exposing the peculiarities
of humdrum familial savagery (though their relationship too is revealed as
nasty, odd, incestuous). They’re not just observers: they’re catalysts for
chaos, demanding love. The same can be said for George, the seemingly passive
father. Salt-of-the-earth. ‘Is there something I’ve missed?’ But mean with
money, a bodgit on the farm, and manipulative of sibling rivalry. Even his
wife, who has left them for Billy in Hastings, cannot stay away.
The beautiful direction which Phil
Osment’s stirring play commands in Mike Alfreds’ sensitive Cambridge TC pro.
duction, is overwhelming. It celebrates and laments the summer of lost naivety.
Is there hope? Cliff and Elvis make way for the Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’. But
it sounds cynical: ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’. All lose the people they love. Though
they have learned what it is to love.
INDEPENDENT
14.3.95
Paul Taylor
From The Turn of the Screw through The
Fallen Idol to Mamet’s Ctyptogram, a
striking proportion of the stage- and screen-works that have a child at their
centre deal with the betrayal of that child’s innocence. often by showing how
he or she is betrayed by an adult into betraying someone else.
Watch a child actor playing such a role
and you find your attention distracted by the uncomrortable doubling of the
effect. Will the pre-pubertal performer, you wonder, come to look back on this
job experience as a parallel case of exploited innocence when he or she is old
enough to appreciate the full significance of artwork only partially
understood at the time?
This problem is successfully skirted
in Mike A]freds’s fine production of What
I Did in the Holidays, a new, intricately observed Hardy-meets-Chekhov-and-O’Neill
play by Philip Osment set in 1963 on a delapidated Devon farm. Pivotal to the
piece, on the verge of puberty and grammar school, short-trousered, brainy
Morley is brought to life in an uncannily arresting performance by a young
adult actor, Antony Taylor. Squirming around on the grass and lolling in
positions that mix childish awkwardness with awakening adolescent flirtation,
Taylor shows you a boy whose homosexuality is on the brink of becoming
conscious. It’s a portrayal that manages to heighten, through its stylised
physicality, a sense of Morley’s inner world, without either having to compromise
a child actor or condescending to the fictional child.
Friendless and much the youngest of his complicatedly riven family, Morley asserts his power by grassing on his seniors and playing on their fears. When begets a personal postcard from their absconded mother, he’s jeered at as a mummy’s boy by his jealous 30-year-old brother Rob (Steve Nicolson). But Morley gets his own back by exposing before strangers the fact that Rob, who was kept from school to work on the farm by their feckless father, can barely read the coveted postcard.
The boy needs a soulmate, and he
seems to have been provided with one when a pair of Scottish hitch-hikers
takes refuge and then jobs on the farm. But Fergus O’Donnell’s excellent Andy,
a tragic blend of aggression and vulnerability, isn’t quite the cowboy-story
role model the child imagines. The scars on this youth’s stomach, which Morley
fingers with a naive yet sexualised awe, aren’t trophies of combat but
self-mutilations, and Andy too has an ambiguous dependency on someone which the
child will be tricked into exposing.
Like his award-winning Dearly Beloved (also set in the West Country and directed by Alfreds), Osment’s new piece displays a rich talent for orchestrating the emotional rivalries and insecurities of a large tangled group. There are many fine performances, especially from Kate Byers as the disappointment-bound older sister and from Chris Crooks as the sly father whose weakness and bad faith are like a body odour. A scene in which a picnic is disrupted by an angry wasp gives you the measure of Alfreds’s and the company’s skills. You don’t see or hear it; it’s from the hallucinatory lifelikeness of its staged effect, not from stage-effects, that the wasp is palpably there.
Flesh And Blood
Published
by Methuen Philip Osment:Plays One and Samuel French
Saturday June 29 1996
MICHAEL
BILLINGTON on
Flesh And Blood
Law of
the land
PHILIP Osment’s Flesh And Blood
dwells on country matters: it is, In fact, the final part of a Devon trilogy
that Osment has been quietly compiling over the past three years. And, although
it somewhat sell~conscious1y mixes Hardy’s fatalism with Chekhov’s sense of
waste, it has a theatrical power that many more ballyhooed dramatists might
envy.
Osment’s theme is the burden of the
past and the tyranny of land. In the first act, set in the 1950s, we see the
cautious, hymn-singing Devonian siblings, Rose and William, doing everything
possible to preve~t their unstable brother, ~ Charles, from selling his share
of thefarm they have jointly inherited: they even block his attempt to escape
through marriage to local good-time girl Shirley. Thirty years later Shirley,
who has emigrated Australia, returns to find the farm and its occupants in
total decay: what is more she comes clutching photographs of her grown-up son,
who may be the natural inheritor of the land:
What is good about Osment’s play is
the sense that the central trio are all victims of their patrimony. A portrait
of their father is suspended over the piano like a religious icon; and the land
they have inherited turns out to be a curse, blighting their emotional lives
and ruining them economically. The farm offers cold comfort but Osment avoids
Starkadderish melodrama by dwelling on rural reality: the rhythms of work
supersede emotional crisis — even at moments of high tension, the pigs must be
fed.
The over-plotted second act is
marginally less gripping than the atmospheric first. But the four actors, who
are concurrently playing Jude The Obscure and Private Lives in rep for the
Method and Madness company, give first-rate performances under Mike Alfreds’s
scrupulously detailed direction. Geraldine Alexander’s Rose, hoarding her
nest-egg to finance a trip to Oberammergau, shows how religion can turn from
genuine consolation into arthritic obsession. Simon Rbbson’s shy William is a walking compendium of sexual
frustration. ~ And Martin Marquez as
the’deanged Charles and Abigail Thaw as Shirley are never less than
outstanding. In an age of promiscuous impermanence it is rare to see a company
at work: this one brings to Osment’s rural tragedy a genuine sense of
theatrical osmosis.
~ In
rep at the Lyric Hammer- -~ smith (0181-741
2311) to .JuIy 27
The Sunday Observer
More pressing, more interesting, is Philip Osment’s new play Flesh and Blood. This completes the Method and Madness trilogy at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and in the first place reasserts the value of ensemble playing as a spur to creativity, as opposed to filling up schedules. Three bereaved siblings on a Devon farm, one of them backward, cope across 30 years with their legacy and the consequences of slow-witted Charles’s affair with a publican’s daughter.
One
of dead Dad’s favourite jokes: ‘She was only a baker’s daughter but, boy, how
she kneaded the dough.’ Not as good as another, more pertinent, relic of the 1923
Bumper Fun Book:
‘She was only a farmer’s daughter, but all the manure (men-knew-’er).’
Snow falls, rooks caw, time passes.
Osment
is writing partly in response to the other two plays in M&M’s season, Jude the Obscure and Private
Lives. And partly, one feels, in the shadow of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire
Under the Elms. The result isa sort of Cold Comfort Farm with epic pretensions,
country blight, hints of incest, and climactic tragedy.
In
Jude, Abigail Thaw plays Arabella
Donn, who returns from Australia with Jude’s son; here, as Shirley, she is
similarly encumbered post-Oz with Charles’s offspring. In Private Lives, Simon Robson as Elyot
spectacularly relaunches his affair with Amanda at the piano keyboard; in
Osment, as the prissy William, he rekindles the heat of the hearthside with
plan-gent renditions of ‘The Ashgrove’, ‘Goodnight Irene’ and the slow movement
of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata.
Osment’s play, and Alfreds’s direction, is brilliant at evoking the nostalgia of Devon country life in a strange, recidivist family—the clock ticks, you can smell the antimacassars — and in the elision between outdoor lust and indoorstuffiness. All four actors are excellent. But Martin Marquez, in particular, completes a trilogy of performances as good as any you can now see on the London stage. His Jude and Victor Prynne are now joined with a stunted Devonian, Charles, whose love for Shhiey and cruel lobotomy consign him to the human vegetable patch.
The
part could have been an embarrassment; he injects it with indescribable humour
and passion. There is a moment when the returning Shirley fails to recognise
this twitching zombie that is the most touching I have witnessed in many moons.
Paul Dart’s design (sets, costumes, lights) conveys the spirituality of place
and atmosphere with unerring accuracy.
The
Sunday OBSERVER
TIME OUT
'Flesh and Blood'
lyric
hammersmith
Completing Method & Madness's
sea-
son - after a solid 'Jude' and a
neat "Pri-
vate Lives' - the quartet of actors
bond
powerfully for Philip Osment's
shatter-
ing 'Flesh and Blood'. Having
played the
fateful marriages of Hardy and the
brittle divorces of Coward, they now
combine hot-blooded/up-tight
sibling
feuding. Osment rounds off his own tri-
logy of dark, humorous Devon plays -
'Dearly Beloved',