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GYPT Show Reviews
| Review of The Wedding Feast |
| By David Ddams in Abergavenny Chronicle |
| On 28th December 2006 |
The Wedding Feast Review by David Adams – Western Mail 8th December 2006 Arnold Wesker, local resident and one of the best playwrights of the past 50 years, apparently didn’t originally think that much of The Wedding Feast when he first wrote it. ‘Very funny by intellectually undemanding’, was his own assessment of what he originally saw as a minor work. Although he is now not so dismissive that he didn’t personally commend it to Gwent Young People’s Theatre Company for their latest production. And, indeed, it is a fascinating play – more than 30 years old and it shows not only in its references but in its poiitics. Wesker has worked on it since it was first produced, not at the Royal Court or indeed anywhere in London, but in Stockholm in 1974 – the 70’s were a depressing decade for Wesker – and his suggestion to Gwent YPT is perhaps a result of his own re-encounter with it at an American university where he directed it, and consequently revised it, in 1995. But I wonder why the author should have thought it made a good piece for a youth theatre. Apart from the fact it has a large cast (14 on teenagers who would relate to Wesker’s particular kind of socialism. This tale based on a Dostoyevsky story, of an employer who desperately wants to be seen as a generous, caring, benevolent boss to his Norfolk workforce, has familiar Wesker issues – a disillusionment with industrial relations in its criticism of both patronising capitalism and awareness of his own Jewishness, an enhanced sense of defeatism and suspicion of that working-class culture which had hitherto motivated his idealistic, polemic playwriting. But to be honest, there isn’t much sign in Chris Durnall’s direction of any real engagement with the characters or the issues. There is some good acting – Leo Jofeh as the paternalist Russian Jewish capitalist and Sophie Forbes-Nash as his desirable secretary are surely headed for professional careers – but at least on the opening night at the company’s Abergavenny base it was all a bit messy. Essentially, it was unconvincing, from the opening scene where the Russian-born shoe manufacturer entertains buyers in his Norfolk country mansion with jam doughnuts on paper plates, to the wedding feast itself where food the unsophisticated guests regard lamb sandwiches, and to the climax where workers half-heartedly beat him with their shoes. There may well be a comedic reason for this interpretation it eluded me. Stylistically the play is interesting and, of course, is for all its faults clearly the work of a craftsman. Wesker suggests using slides to illustrate the background to the scenes before the wedding feast itself and has a prologue with a cynical Marxist as a commentator setting the scene. The images to suggest the magnate’s mansion, his be-curlered wife, his bathroom and an anachronistically pedestrianised Norwich city centre, however, didn’t really work, with their pause-previous-next labels a distraction and the pictures themselves of mediocre quality. Like Wesker’s early plays, there is something of the autobiographical about A Wedding Feast – he came from a communist family background, some of his family moved to Norfolk and he himself married a Norfolk girl. And Wesker fans will recognise not just the themes of political disillusionment but also Kate, a grown-up Beattie from Roots, his most famous play, with an echo of her original self in Bonky, a working-class naďve painter who refuses to sell her work to her boss and whose almost pathetic claim as an artist to be concerned with ‘the earth’ is an echo of the voices of Wesker’s countryfolk in Roots. The young company manage some of the comedy well, and it can be very funny at times, but this excellent youth company can be sharper, more convincing and more able to express their many talents. |