Theatre

The Pope’s Wedding: don’t mention the war

Alan Hindle | Sunday 3 October, 2010 18:18

The Pope’s Wedding, Cock Tavern Theatre, 125 Kilburn High Rd, NW6 6JH, Until Oct 2

Bill is the top man on the bottom rung of a rural community. Girls throw themselves at him, the cricket pitch is his to command, the lads always give him the last word.

The boss wants him to work during a match, however, and on the day it’s backward Scopey who proves a hero on the field. From that day everything changes for Scopes. He gets Bill’s girl, Pat. The boys follow his lead. But being alpha dog is not really in Scopey’s make-up. It’s not until he barges into the junk shop of the pensioner Pat looks after, the dementia fuddled Allen, that he makes a connection with anything more resonant than a googly.

In the programme notes for The Pope’s Wedding are Five Little Essays by Edward Bond that show the great curmudgeon of British theatre has lost none of his curmudge. In “Come Prancing” he writes: “The National Theatre has a play about the First World War. The war was bad. It killed horses… The horses are represented by puppets. They are very beautiful… Nick Clegg – the half-man – saw a performance. It seems an image of the times: the corrupt mingling with the puppets.”

Man, I laughed.

There is a streak of bitter humour running through The Pope’s Wedding, subtle and grim though it may be. Set in post war Essex (the war the horses weren’t in) the quiet violence of boredom in the rural communities as work dried up is presented in a long and amazing patches of inertia. I say amazing, because nowadays to have six men stand around slack-jawed on stage for ten minutes at a time seems astonishing. The confidence Bond showed in his first play, almost fifty years ago, to allow the tempers simmering in the anxious, workless young workers for so long- it’s hard to imagine a modern production willing to risk that.

The cast are uniformly excellent, especially Tim O’Hara as the increasingly distant Scopey and Rebecca Tanwen as Pat, the girl everybody in town is after, who’s just after a stable life with a guy who’s present. A lot of actors in a small space, increases the claustrophobia of living in dying community, yet the cricket match is cleverly presented in broken angles and off-stage action and stretches the action and mood. Hell, the staging almost made sense of cricket for me. I always thought it was about cucumber sandwiches.

The dissolution of Scopey, as he perhaps realises his moment in the sun was not only stolen, but never within his grasp to steal, is a beautifully observed tragedy. Life is a subtle and grim joke.

Right around the corner from where I live, Theatre Delicatessen have created a warren of spaces and a pinko bar in the former Uzbekistan Airlines building, dedicated to creating intimate theatre. Theatre Souk plays with the notion of commerce and attaching value to art by having twelve small companies stage performances and then vie with each other for the audience wandering the spiraling hallways and random corridors.

I have been angling to get in and see this multi-layered venue for ages. And while the guy at the door let me, he informed me I’d have to pay for each playlet.
“Maybe I can haggle with the companies,” I said, waggling my eyebrows charmingly. “My review is the price for letting me see their show.”

“No, you’ll need to pay, like, two pounds each.”

Well, snipe pays its writers in beer and dreams. Especially dreams about beer. Every month the publisher takes the staff outside and points up at the sky.

“What would you like?”

Requests for money, flashy cars, substantial relationships with attractive celebrities will result in him directing your attention to clouds shaped like bags of money, Volkswagons, and Cheryl Cole. This is considered remuneration in the alternative newspaper publishing world.

So, I didn’t have any cash to spend on these, no doubt excellent, snippets of theatre, lurking in the darkened corners of the Uzbekistani jetsetter’s ex-ambassador to the heavens. Maybe they tried to pay their bills in clouds as well.

Go to www.theatredelicatessen.co.uk and have a look. The three shows I would’ve especially liked to see were Flabbergast Theatre’s surly Puppet Poker Pit, Lab Theatre Collective’s Matador/Bullpen, and Keiko Sumida’s quiet and unobtrusive Counter Number 8.

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