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', 'What I Did in the
Holidays' - by showing an
introspective
world incapable of leaping into an
era of
change: human potential in terminal
de-
cline.
Part One. The 1950s. Rose, William
and Charles are left to run their farm after
the death of their tyrannical father
- he
horse-whipped them and generally de-
prived them of affection. Charles
wants to
be released. He gets engaged to
flirty
Shirley. She gets pregnant and isn't
sure
Charles is the father. So he rejects
her,
plunges into depression, then his
brother
and sister commit him to an asylum.
Part Two. An audacious jump into the
1980s. Still on the farm, the three
siblings
are debt-ridden. William is
embittered.
Charles is mentally damaged. Rose
pours her affection on to her cat,
Snowy.
Shirley returns from her own
isolation -
Australia's outback - where she has
raised Charles' son. In a meticulous
slow-
burning drama, her return proves
highly
explosive.
Like Billy Roche, or Richard Cameron.
Osment celebrates life while exposing
its
blighted core, the bleak soul beneath
the
blissful surface. Devon's visceral
farm
life is riddled with anxiety. All
make sac-
rifices, but to no avail: 'We're
still going
down the same old tracks, only the
ruts
have got deeper.' Excellent acting is
inspired by Mike Alfreds' truthful
dir-
ection. This production crowns a bold
touring repertory project. Simon Reade
Who’s Breaking?
Manchester
Evening News
Wednesday
January 28th 1998
Tough stuff, but moving and funny,
too
• WHO’S BREAKING?
M6 Theatre Co tour
NOT so long ago, Britain had scores of theatre in education companies to
introduce youngsters to the excitement of live performance and expand their
view of the word. Sadly, funding cuts mean that few now survive. Happily,
Rochda1e-based M6 is one,
and their work is better than ever. Who’s Breaking? by award-winning writer Philip Osment, is pretty tough stuff — aimed at the 14-plus age range — about HIV, relationships and sexuality.
Stave (Stephen Banks) is one of the lads. He pubs and clubs it, and has
a girlfriend (Vicki-Jade Smith) who wants them to get a flat together. Then he
finds he is HIV positive, as a result of injecting steroids at the gym, and
sharing a needle with a mate who is now dying of Aids.
In a turmoil of emotions, feeling unable to tell girlfriend or parents,
Sieve confides in a gay trainee social worker (Jonathan Voe), and a platonic
friendship develops with him and his boyfriend (Stephen Burke).
The script raises a mass of subject
matter that also includes the problems of growing apart from parents, attitudes
or straights to gays and gays to straights, and, above all, just how do you
deal with learning that you’ll probably die of Aids? It pulls few punches, but
there’s no lack of sensitivity either. It Is moving and, amazingly, funny. Under
the direction of Nadia Molinari, all the performances are excellent.
On tour to schools, youth centres and art. venue. until April, Including Bury Met (Fob 12) and Heywood Civic 14.11 (Mar 26)
Sleeping Dogs
For forty years the leader has ruled
with an iron fist.
For forty years the stray dogs slept
peacefully in the park.
Far forty years their families have
lived as neighbours.
But times are changing...
Using rich classical tent and
heightened poetic language, Sleeping Dogs”tells
the story of Assan and Marina, two young lovers from different celteres with
different religions and different customs. When the old government is swept
away and peace is threatened Assan and Marina find themselves caught in the
crossfire of a community at war. Can their love survive...?
Set in a mythical Eastern European
country ‘Sleeping Dogs” is a symbolic
and haunting piece of theatre.
A contemporary love story reflecting
the conflicts at our time, “Sleeping
Dogs” is a show not to be missed by both young and old.
Listen
Ian is 16. He likes cars, comics and
watching TV. He is deaf and he and his father Barry have never communicated.
His mother, Sharon, often feels like a referee: settling conflicts and easing
tensions between them.
LISTEN tells the story of what
happens to this family when Barry is diagnosed as having a serious illness.
Their response to the crisis is shown with warmth and humour as they struggle
to ‘listen’ to each other for the first time.
“The whole standard of production was excellent, and
held everyone spellbound. Even more impressive, however, was the sensitivity
used to handle two emotive issues: namely those of hearing impairment and
cancer.
Inspector for Schools, Solihull.
“The performance was energised with a strong ensemble
feeling and teamwork. There was truth in the characterisation which make the
changes of role convincing. The audience of fourth years were throughout very
attentive to an absorbing exploration of family and peer group relationships.”
Chair British Assitej
Published
by Methuen in Gay Sweatshop:Four plays and a company
Edited
by Philip Osment
"Gay Sweatshop's seven-handed
production of Philip Osment's play
presents a chapter from the definitive
English soap for the 80s. That's not
intended to be derogatory - this play's
a complete delight: funny, provocative.
compassionate and poetic. The players
each take several parts, sometimes
recounting the tale in third person,
sometimes addressing the audience
direct, gently knitting together several
strands of a narrative involving factors
of serendipity, racism, old age,
loneliness, lost love, cats, resurgent
fascism, homophobia and the traumas
of gay youth. The cleverly dotty
complexity of character and plot would
take pages to unravel, but fans of.
particularly, Armistead Maupin. Tom
Wakefield or, indeed, Dickens, will
immediately recognise a sympathetic
soul at work here. This company is a
remarkably effective unit. slipping
easily through a gallery of cameos, or
linking chapters musically: strumming
guitars, duetting on an upright.
combining in doowop trios or en masse
for a plangent unaccompanied choral
threnody. It proves, happily impossible
to single out any one actor for praise
and they clearly delight in a script so
meaty, affectionate and personal, and
so un-glib. Go see immediately. It's the
kind of play you'll want to play a part
in." TIME OUT (Critics Choice!
"the mellowest, most warm-hearted and
sagely contemplative new play I've seen in
many months .. . poses awkward questions
about the loyalties of the oppressed...
a delicate, paradoxical tale, convincingly
told" LISTENER
"compelling ... This beautifully realised
production is above all superlatively well-
acted ... it is indeed rare to see a cast of
such uniform excellence ... a total pleasure
to watch" CAPITAL GAY
"instructive, ironic, gentle and warning of
the need ever to defend personal liberties
under siege ... with grace, sharpness and
wit" OBSERVER
"another success from the G.S. theatre
company . . . shines bright in the dark days
of Section 28. It is not to he missed"
MORNING STAR
"finely observed writing ... persuasively
delivered" HAMPSTEAD & HIGHGA TE EXPRESS
"a sad, strong and sophisticated play . ..
provides ironic comment for our times ...
one is left feeling both disturbed and
curiously optimistic. Well worth seeing"
PINK PAPER
"goes to the heart of what it means to
promote homosexuality ... a moving, fine-
brush panorama" INDEPENDENT
"Thoroughly recommended" CAM DEN NEW
JOURNAL
"a beautifully written piece, full of
characters sensitively observed, vividly
brought to life by excellent actors prompting
laughter and tears ... a hugely enjoyable
life-enhancing production" TIMES ED.
SUPP.
"striking performances" GA Y TIMES
"What a breath of inspiration this hilarious
play proved to be ... bringing the art of
lyrical story-telling back to the stage... a//
come vividly to life with a gifted economy of
words . . . it is so funny" WHA T'S ON
"a welcome celebration of self-discovery,
self-confidence and pride" CITY LIMITS
Buried Alive
Published
by Oberon Books
Third World Scotland
BURIED ALIVE: Hampstead theatre
Verdict: Grim but deeply impressive new tragedy of childhood • . -*-*-*-*-^
•
NOT exactly the most attractive title, I know. But if I see a more powerful,
better acted or more brilliantly directed play all year than this new one from
Philip Osment, I shall count myself lucky
indeed.
A journalist (Michelle Joseph) tracks down a war photographer, Stewart (Paul Higgins),whose Third World forays have landed him with a Brazilian son. What drives him? What's his story? Flashback to a bleak Scottish childhood, where Stewart and his two sisters are incarcerated — sometimes literally — in a household that makes Eugene O'Neill took like the Teletubbies. Tyrannical Mum (Veronica Roberts) and gibbering Dad (Gary Lilburn), as well as wide-boy Uncle Jack (John Ramm), destroy their children with pious affection, and worse, and are In turn destroyed by them. Like Sarah Kane's Blasted in reverse, Stewart's images of global deprivation work backwards to the reality of domestic disaster. Mike Alfreds' fluid, masterful production uses a turquoise, dreamscape design of Robert Jones that straddles both Edinburgh past and Suffolk present. The narrative is superbly controlled, the second act opening the cleverest I've ever seen.
Michael
Coveney
DAILY
MAIL
Daily
Telegraph
Friday 27th April 2001
Uplifting darkness
Buried Alive
HAMPSTEAD ThEATRE
A FEW years ago at Hampstead, Philip
Osment came up with a beautiful Chekhovian piece, The Dearly Beloved, which dealt with the unfashionable subject of
the members of a church choir in the West Country.
Now comes Buried Alive, a raw, powerful, moving family tragedy that also
finds time to examine the topical theme of the ethics of the tabloid press. The
drama occupies two time zones:
Edinburgh in the late Seventies and
Edinburgh and Suffolk in the year 2000, moving backwards and forwards to show
the malign influence of the past on the present.
The central character, Stewart Reid,
is a hard-drinking photo-journalist, celebrated for his uncompromising pictures
of human suffering, most famously a shot of two homosexuals being buried alive
in gravel by the Taliban in Afghanistan. But another journalist is on his
trail, determined to discover the man behind the work —and a juicy story it
proves, as the scenes set in the Seventies gradually lay bare.
Stewart was the eldest of three
children who grew up with a hideously puritanical mother who kept them hungry
and bullied them mercilessly in the name of God. Small offences were met by
long spells of solitary in the coal cellar until Stewart, her favourite,
rebelled and joined the Merchant Navy, leaving his younger sisters entirely at
their mother’s less than tender mercy.
I don’t want to give too much away,
but the family endured tragedy and scandal from which Stewart has been on the
run ever since, until finally forced to confront both his past and his
responsibilities. The revelations prove desperately bleak, not least in the
play’s view of the tyranny of genetic inheritance, though the final moments
beautifully signal the possibility of forgiveness and fresh starts.
All nine characters come alive in
Mike Alfreds’s detailed, deeply felt production, which handles the time shifts
with beautiful assurance. I only wish designer Robert Jones hadn’t come up with
such an offputtingly ugly set.
Veronica Roberts is unforgettably
horrible as the mother who constantly commands her children to get down on
their knees and pray for forgiveness, and Jane Arnfield and Louise Bush are
almost unbearably touching as her vulnerable teenage victims. Paul Higgins
captures all the anger and hurt of Stewart, Michelle Joseph precisely nails a
particularly devious kind of female journalist and there’s outstanding support
from Al Nedjari as Kate’s heroically loyal boyfriend and from John Ramm as an
uncle who isn’t nearly as jolly as he seems.
For all its pain, you leave this fine
play elated by witnessing such terrific writing and acting.
Financial Times
Thursday
26th April 2001
THEATRE
Quietly,
slowly, getting a grip
The story that slowly unfolds in
Philip Osment’s Buried Alive is like
a Barbara Vine novel — that absorbing, that painful. It hits you quite
differently, however, partly because it takes place before your eyes in a
theatre. At first, you hardly know who you are watching, why you are watching
them, or if you should care. Osment’s gift is not for immediate entertainment
or striking dialogue, and, though he is an experienced playwright, there are
several small ways in which you are aware he is not yet a mature one. But, just
as you think his ear could be keener and his rhythm firmer, he quietly closes
his grip on you.
In
fact, Buried Alive (the point of the
title does not hit you until well into Act Two) starts out like two separate
stories. One is the English tale of Stewart, a prestigious but alienated
Scottish-born photojournalist who has specialized in heartrending Third World
pictures, the son who has come to find him from Brazil, and the inquisitive
black London journalist, Ammy, who is researching him. The other is of a poor
Edinburgh family: the cold, angry, Calvinistic Margaret, her slightly insane
and depressed husband Andrew and their daughters Kate and Liz. You first start
to feel Osment’s grasp when you realise that this Edinburgh family is what
Stewart has left behind: that he is brother to Kate and Liz, that their scenes
are in the past, that he today has nothing to do with them. But Osment keeps
throwing in other strange fragments: you see Liz today, a nervous, tender woman
in whom childish simplicity has become pathetically fixed, you see Ammy
interviewing Stewart’s uncle Jack, you see the family’s Scots/Italian
acquaintance Giovanni.
You
don’t quite know what’s going on, but you want to find out. The past starts to
matter more than the present, but it has not yet disclosed its horror. You’ve
sensed that the present day Stewart’s problems as a parent come from his
Scottish childhood, but you can’t tell what he is repressing. The overlap of
the scenes becomes an increasingly fluent kaleidoscope. Mike Alfreds’s staging
realises this with marvelous theatrical ease — there is a scene in Act Two when
we find ourselves watching six different situations simultaneously - and Robert
Jones’s seemingly drab nowhere-in-particular decor changes, like memory, from
one specific locale to another. And you find you’re watching an appallingly
suspenseful story of multiple family crime - excessive sexual repression,
incest, domestic incarceration, parricide, suicide -amid which the present-day
scenes also develop their own suspense. The very keenness you’ve had to gain
full understanding of past crime and psychological damage is set against its
opposite: dread of tabloid journalistic exposure.- The play’s ending - hopeful
- is a little soft, but the start of
Act Two is a brilliant surprise. All nine performances are truly excellent, but
Veronica Roberts deserves especial congratulation: as the appalling matriarch
Margaret, she asks for no pity, acts with complete objectivity and becomes the
most intensely real person onstage. You are repelled by what she does, but you
want to know much more about her. Even as you hate her, you feel yourself
within her.
Alastair Macaulay
Variety
Monday 4th June 2001
BURIED ALIVE
(HAMPSTEAD
THEATER)
By MATT
WOLF
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F |
or a drama
centered around a phony contrivance, it’s astonishing just how packed with
quiet truths “Buried Alive” is. That much may not be immediately clear from author
Philip Osment’s set-up, which puts center-stage a devious journalist (is there
any other kind in Britain?) who won’t do perceptions of the Fourth Estate any
favors. But once Osment moves beyond
the device driving his plot and starts sifting through a family’s anguished
past, “Buried Alive” lets rip with an avalanche of feeling in direct proportion
to the clamped-down Scottish repressions that the play goes on to relate.
At first, there’s little to indicate the
particularly fearsome stature of the skeletons that come tumbling out of the
cupboard of photographer Stewart Reid (Paul Higgins), whom reporter Ammy
(Michelle Joseph) has traveled to Suffolk to interview for a rather
spurious-sounding expose. Living in semi-seclusion — virtually a given for creative
types these days, between this play, London’s recent “Enigmatic Variations’
(“Enigma Variations’ in the States) and Off Broadway’s “Ten Unknowns” —Stewart
has taken custody of his 15-year-old son, Luis (Simon Trinder), whose Brazilian
mother died a year before. What Stewart can’t control are the awful
reminiscences of an upbringing that Ammy’s probing is determined to lay bare.
Ammy has hardly set foot in Stewart’s cottage
before she’s extolling an erstwhile photo essay of his on Soweto, for prodding
her towards journalism. That, in turn. leads to an affair rooted as much in
impulsive need as it is in feeling. Osment is on much firmer – not to mention
scarier – ground rewinding the clock to the coalface of Stewart’s Edinburgh
roots, where the threat of the coal cellar, in fact looms large.
Banishment to this ominously spoken-of oubliette is the preferred punishment of
meted out by Margaret (Veronica Roberts). Stewart’s God –fearing termagant of a
mother, to his sisters, Kate (Jane Arnfield) and Liz (Louise Bush) . As for
Andrew (Gary Lilburn) , their Dad, don’t look
for succor there: he’s ineffectual at best, deeply potty at worst
As exquisitely set forth by director Mike Alfreds on
a set by Robert Jones that exudes its own sooty green wash, “Buried Alive” sets
then and now on a poignant collision course. Kate’s abidingly sweet courtship
by local lad Giovanni’s (Al Nedjari) is juxtaposed with the hapless restaurant
owner that Giovanni becomes – a onetime innocent now steeped in life’s abrasive
experience. Kate and Liz, in turn have
lived to experience too much, as Stewart might well have as well, had he not
escaped into the merchant navy.
Travel however doesn’t necessarily turn the mind to
happier thoughts: Stewart’s audacious career, or so the play argues, is
inseparable from an awful childhood containing matricide, incest and various
random acts of cruelty not far-removed from the tyrannical images that have
made Stewart’s renown possible.
It’s easy to question the play’s pat psychologizing about
the relationship of life to art, while Ammy’s second act speech dismissing
Stewart’s profession suffers from the same “macho posturing” that her broadside
itself derides. Where Osment unquestionably scores is in rising above yet
another study in British drear; there’s a “Mommie Dearest” style melodrama,
albeit with a Scottish accent, inherent in the events chronicled in “Buried
Alive” that make a passing remark like “people are dangerous” (as the damaged
Liz, now relegated to a nursing home, informs an equally wounded blackbird)
seem like the understatement of all time.
But Osment captures the shifting eddies of human
feeling that lie beneath the headlines, and he’s blessed with a superlative
cast capable of traversing the decades and moods with ease. Playing the
matriarch from hell, Roberts is allowed a fiercely lonely cry from the heart
during a game of solitaire even as, minutes later, she’s pouring tea on her
defenseless daughter. As her scarred of offspring who find the past not easily
sloughed off, Higgins, Arnfield and Bush adroitly enact three separate points
on the constantly present spectrum of pain that “Buried Alive” brings
bruisingly to life.
The Undertaking
Published by Oberon Books
Poignant premiere
in the city
The Undertaking
Haymarket Studio until tonight
Review: Lizz Brain
IT’S about death, HIV, drugs, sex and morality, and the ultimate selfishness of human emotion.
When Henry dies, four friends travel to a remote island to bid him a final farewell, but before long they are blaming themselves and each other for what they did and did not do while he was alive.
This tackles head-on the guilt and regret felt by those left behind, but without being heavy or morose.
The Undertaking is sensitive, touching and sweet, its sadness emphasised by gentle humour.
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Liam Halligan was superb as Henry's former lover Michael - an Irishman who is convinced he is, or will be, HIV positive, who retreats into himself rather than accept how he deserted Henry in his dying days.
Gary Lilburn was also excellent as Michael's brother Patrick - the archetypal decent man who thinks he tolerates Michael's homosexuality, while instinctively believing the point of life is to have children and give something to the future.
A world premiere in Leicester, this is a delicate, poignant piece, beautifully done.
Evening Herald,
THURSDAY, MAY 18, 2000
THE UNDERTAKING Andrews Lane Studio
A GOOD funeral, if playwright Philip Osment is to be believed, should involve a few tabs of ecstasy, some skinny dipping, plenty of sex and culminate in a cliff-top new age ceremony conducted by an aromatherapist.
Well, perhaps Osment is not really suggesting this is the ideal way to do things, but it is certainly how the event is approached in The Undertaking.
Osment's is a sort of gay road movie of a drama, with an incompatible bunch of characters heading to Ireland to discharge their duty to a dead friend.
Like all good camping trips, as soon as the groundsheets unfurl and the search for the elusive tent-peg begins, a blazing row of vile accusations and equally scurrilous recriminations gets underway.
The result is an anxious, Alan Ayckbournish comedy with most of the laughs coming mingled with grimaces.
Of the strong cast Seamus Power has the easiest comedy style. There is a touch of Fr. Dougal’s shoe-gazing shyness to the performance, but it remains full of charm. Seamus Moran's Michael doesn't care much for charm, but even he has to smile at the mumbo-jumbo ceremony conducted by Myles Breen's loveably flaky 21st century pagan, Howard.
- Luke Clancy
IRISH INDEPENDENT, THURSDAY, MAY 18, 2000
Final journey exposes hidden truths
A GROUP of four friends embark from
London to Kerry to carry out the. last wish of their dead friend Henry in
Philip Osment’s commissioned work. ‘The
Uiiclertaking’ in the Andrcw’s Lane Studio.
For Michael. Sheila, Howard Earnon.
this becomes much more than just a journey in memory of Henry. The titular
quest may beio scatter his ashes on a remote uninhabited island off Dingle, but
REVIEW
By Sophie Gonnan
in doing so, each member of the
group has unwittingly
undertaken to learn something new about themselves . and about their own
honesty or lack of it.
As passions flare and relationship become as fraught and
tang1ed as their tent ropes and pegs, each is forced to face strong home
truths, normaily kept buried under the intricate web of their daily lives. If
that wasn’t enough to contend with, Henry’s former lover Michael must also
confront his first return to his family’s Kerry farm and his brother Patrick
since he physically and. emotionally detached himself from them and they from
him when lie made the’ official move to come out’.
Although Osment’s work is peppered with clichés of the gay and rural Ireland variety, the play’s inherent humour mixed with bitter resentment creates some credible scenarios and raises laudable issues without forcing them. Under Liam Halligan’s direction, all five characters develop steadily. There are strong performances from Stella Madden as strong-willed Sheila, Seamus Moran as paranoid Michael and Seamus Power as his farming brother Patrick.
LITTLE VIOLET AND THE ANGEL
Published by Oberon Books
Theatre
Guardian
June
23 2001
Lilian
Baylis Theatre, London
It is tough being a guardian angel. At least, young Gabriel finds it so. He’s developed a bad cold because heaven is not as warm as you might think, and he just can’t be bothered to master the harp. The Boss, better known as the Archangel Gabriel or “his shininess”; is always on his back because young Gabriel tends to neglect his charge, a little baby abandoned on the doorstep of an elderly couple. The husband wants to keep the child, but the wife, wrapped up in grief for her son killed in an accident, has no time for the baby and wants to send her to the orphanage. It is Gabriel’s job to make sure that the child is saved from this fate.
Philip Osment’s play,
as tender as a baby’s bottom, was the joint winner of the Peggy Ranisay award, Britain’s
richest play-writing prize. The fact that it is intended for children is
irrelevant. It is an exceptional play that maps the contours of the human
heart, and one that both children and adults can enjoy together. There is no
pushing of curriculum-based issues here, no condescension; just riveting storytelling and a
compassionate understanding of the way people choose either to ftilfil their
lives or blight them by opening their hearts or shutting them down. It captures
a mother’s love in all its fierce intensity. And it offers real tragedy in its
depletion of a woman who discovers too late that what she rejected was what she most loved. This is a meaty,
emotionally mature play that has the making of a modern classic.
Lyn Gardner
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Jeremy Samuel is a literature and performance graduate |
The Herald, Thursday 28 June 2001
Little Violet and the Angel, MacRobert Arts Centre,
Stirling
Keith Bruce
HOW’S this for an end-of-term treat? A fabulous staging
of a brand new fable in an Anglo-Romanian production staged with a considerable
and delightful debt to that master of theatrical story-telling, Peter Brook.
Written
and directed by Philip Osment, whose CV includes acclaimed work with Gay Sweatshop,
Method and Madness, Red Ladder and Contact Theatre to name but a few, Little
Violet is a co-production between the MacRobert and Theatre Centre, and of
a scale rarely seen for young people outside the festive season. Osment’s tale
has the feel of a classic. Our angel guide, a young cherub who shares a name
with the boss, Gabriel, is guardian to Little Violet, portrayed by a succession
of adorable puppets operated with huge skill by veteran Romanian puppeteer
Aneta Forna-Christu. Their relationship is the substance of the tale as he
watches over her after she is abandoned on the doorstep of an elderly couple
(David Plimmer and Etela Pardo).
For
Viorica (her Romanian name), young Gabriel (Chris Buckingham) is her “imaginary
“ friend and there is a whole layer of interest in what is seen and unseen on
stage, all of which, of course, is readily accepted by it’s large target
audience – as is one of the most concise explanations of the origins of the
universe you are likely to hear. The cast take Osment’s elegant structure, both
in the text and in the simple illusions, and give it a relaxed, improvisatory
edge, particularly Liviu Manolache as Gabriel senior (he also provides the
music).
Truly
magical – what a wrench it must have been for the young audience to leave this
world to go back to school. I know how I felt.
THE STAGE MAY 31st 2001
THEATRE REVIEW
Cardiff/Touring
Little Violet and the Angel
What a sparking gem of stimulating entertainment for seven to 11year-olds is this piece, joint
winner of the Peggy Ramsay Play Award 2000.
Written
and superbly directed by Philip Osment, this Theatre Centre presentation opened to an enraptured young
audience at the Sherman. Imaginatively staged by a cast of six, quite
outstanding puppetry is in the skilled hands of Aneta Foma-Christu and Avital
Dvory. It also features a whole series of visually exciting designs by
Carmencita Brojboiu.
Set
in the Balkans and showing the strength of Theatre Centre’s links with Romanian
artists, the 90-minute play tells of baby Viorica (Little Violet) abandoned on
the doorstep of a couple still mourning the death of their only son.
A
very junior angel, Gabriel (Chris Buckingham), is sent to .Earth to guard her.
The wife Ana-Maria (Eteta Pardo) is unsympathetic, but her husband Vlad (David
Plimmer) is overjoyed. How and why Gabriel finally earns his angelic wings
provides a most moving climax.
The
songs, music and atmospheric effects are played by composer Liviu Manolache,
who also portrays a severe Archangel Gabriel and a comic doctor whose every
appearance is met with delighted laughter.
Jon
Holliday
Leaving
Susan
Conley |
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LEAVING
Irish Examiner
Granary Theatre
THERE
were two poignant points of reference within which to frame Quare Hawk Theatre
Company's adaptation of Philip Osment’s Leaving, at the Granary Theatre,
UCC.
The first
was Jeff Buckley’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Halleluiah, which filled the
pre-show auditorium, prompting the audience to reflect on the senselessness of
tragedy. The second was the eerie and
the uncomfortable silence from the audience immediately following the final
curtain call.
Within
these two reference points, a thought-provoking, insightful and at times
emotional piece of theatre emerged.
Quare
Hawks is a polished and assured theatrical machine, ploughing through both
rural and urban consciousness from their base in Co Monaghan. Their previous
offerings were both critical successes, touring extensively to national and
international venues. Philip Osment wrote this, their third production, in
response to the increase of young male suicide in rural Ireland.
Leaving
portrays the story of a Northern farming family. The son Noel (Cohn O’Donoghue)
arrives home unexpectedly from college in Dublin. Always the “smart and
sensible one”, he appears the total opposite to his slightly older sibling,
Sean (Conan Sweeney), whose life revolves around farming, GAA, drinking and
girlfriend Deirdre (Laura Jane Laughlin).
In truth though, the brothers share not only the same apparent love interest,
but also arguably the same psyche. Parents Paddy (Brendan Laird) and Una
(Deirdre Monaghan) struggle to come to terms with the intricacies and
complexities of brotherhood.
When
suicide enters the plot, it catches the audience unawares. Poetry figures
largely in the narrative, a strange mix between Patrick Kavanagh’s stony grey soil
and Ted Hughes’ mechanical darkness. Sean and Noel emerge as Lorcaesque figures
in front of a hugely symbolic and at times hallucinogenic backdrop, which
employs video projection to great effect.
It’s
difficult to explore the plot without ruining the theatrical impact. The acting
is first rate, composed, well-rehearsed and tightly controlled. The play avoids
being over sentimental and manages. to sustain a coherent storyline throughout,
due in no small part to the strong characterisations and convincing portrayals
from the entire cast.
Set
design is extremely productive, managing to appear both simple and symbolic.
Sound, music and lighting all contributed significantly to the play’s
hard-hitting emotional impact.
Director
Liam Halligan has a timely production on his hands, but unfortunately. due to
funding restraints, the current run is limited. It finishes at the Granary’
tonight, plays Clonmel on July 9 and should appeal to anyone with a social
consciousness.
Brian
O’Connell
Last revised: Date 21st June 2002