Theatre
Morning and Evening (Hampstead) Borders of Paradise (Watford) The Memorandum (Orange Tree, Richmond)
Forever a Dane
Sheridan Morley
I t would be unforgivably impertinent and unScandinavian of me to suggest that if the world is going to end abruptly in our lifes- pan we may as well be in Denmark at the time, but that is certainly the thought prompted by Astrid Saalbach's Morning and Evening which (in a translation by Michael Evans) can be found at Hamp- stead, a theatre going through just about the worst season for new writing in recent memory.
A new play from Scandinavia is indeed a London rarity, even on the fringe, and it's not as though I was expecting Peer Gynt: but Saalbach's defiantly obscure, elliptical series of pre-intermission sketches, fol- lowed by a lengthy alfresco dinner party at which the apocalypse comes all too slowly, is not exactly an advertisement for what we have been missing. The director, John Dove, has gathered a starry cast (Polly Adams, Selina Cadell, Reece Dinsdale), who must be under the impression that something meaningful is going on here, but quite what is never made clear. The natural order has broken down, the stars and moon have disappeared and there is bird-song at midnight; but across a series of moody, marital-breakdown dialogues all we really get is a sense of vague irritation among Copenhagen's affluent elite, who might as well be regretting the absence of a caterer for all the real feeling we get of anything very terrible happening out there.
Speeches lifted out of context are usually unfair, but when a character starts telling us that 'we live as in a dream but the alarm bells are ringing and our cosy nests are no longer safe', it is perhaps a good idea to wake up and try to find some more cheer- ful people to have dinner with. Either them or a good Danish dramatist.
At the Palace Theatre in Watford, the outgoing director Lou Stein has Sharman Macdonald's Borders of Paradise, a new play which comes as a considerable disap- pointment after the quiet joys of her Winter Guest (still at the Almeida). Once again we are on the sands, her favourite territory for now, the borderlines of earth and sea and sky, and once again we are focused on teenagers who have everything ahead of them if only they could work out quite where ahead really lay.
The problem here, as in Morning and Evening, is that nothing happens very slowly in act one, and then happens again in act two: we are now in the midst of five English boys and two Scots girls who can only make contact on a same-sex basis and even then very haltingly. After listening for an hour or two to their hesitant, stumbling attempts to focus on what is really the cause of their general inability to come to terms with the world around them, I began irreverently to long for Sandra Dee and the days when beach movies at least had plots and some vague attempt at character development.
Sharman has always been a poet among dramatists, and she deals in a regretful mix of painful memory and hesitant hope: her young people here are in a no-persons-land somewhere between childhood and death, having come from nowhere very much but already aware that wherever they now go will almost certainly not be where they would have liked to end up.
Yet there's oddly little bitterness here, just occasional bursts of hormonal aggres- sion: these are surfers all right, but only on very low waves. What has unfairly happened is that, in hoping to avoid all the old clichés of teenage angst, Macdonald has tried with- out much success to find a new way of giving adolescence a stage voice of its own.
There is a welcome revival of The Memo- randum at the Orange Tree in Richmond which was where, 20 years ago, Sam Wal- ters pioneered the plays of Vaclav Havel only later to have the pleasure of flying to Prague for a quiet consultation with his house dramatist and to find him on a bal- cony waving to the several million people who had just elected him their President. Havel's satire on office politics as a micro- cosm for the national variety may have grown a little creaky of late, but this is still a sprightly farce with a chilly centre.
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