@ Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 14 Mar 2015
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, with its Soviet-era line-up of gilded governors, shifty officials and put-upon peasants, ought to have faded from relevance post Cold War. Yet here we are in 21st century Britain, with austerity at home and a new Cold War bubbling abroad. Once again, a land of haves versus have-nots, impoverished single mothers and warmongering establishment figures is all too horribly recognisable. It’s a fact that has not been lost on Lyceum Artistic Director Mark Thomson who programmed and directs this timely revival.
Bertolt Brecht‘s parable follows Grusha, a peasant girl in the Central Asian state of Grusinia, after she seizes the State Governor’s baby child who has been abandoned during a coup. Poor and scared, she flits through the countryside, pursued by soldiers, before the Governor’s wife returns to town and attempts to reclaim her son. Ultimately, it falls to the town’s newly-appointed judge, the comical Azdak, to preside over the determination of true motherhood, by means of the circle of the play’s title.
In his programme notes, Thomson speaks of how Brecht used songs and laughter to make audiences more receptive and his production strongly emphasises both. To some extent, this is welcome. The performance never lacks for pace, any potential ponderousness being punctured by a visual gag here, an innuendo there. But there have simply been too many ingredients added to this recipe. Chalk Circle, already not an easy play to get along with, is made more chaotic with a jumble of distractions. The audience is bombarded with conflicting sensory information which clouds rather than distils Brecht’s vision.
The music that ought to propel the work, clashes with it. Contemporary rock has been favoured over something more folky, and through no fault of Sarah Swire as The Singer, the sound is simply too coarse for the Lyceum’s acoustics. Swire’s vocals are muddied by her electric guitar, and important emphases and entire words are swamped.
Costumes are similarly befuddled. Where other productions might opt for peasant or Communist chic, there’s no defining aesthetic here. Ski-hats, gold business suits, Christmas jumpers and a hefty amount of cross-dressing are the order of the day, ranging from the glamour-puss (Jon Trenchard‘s unnervingly attractive Governor’s Wife) to the full Mrs Brown (most of the other males at one time or another). Alongside this, characters display a baffling profusion of accents – Welsh, Yorkshire, Cockney, Brum – to no apparent end. Sparingly used, a certain surrealism is to be applauded, but the overload acts as a barrier to the play’s message.
It is a shame that there are some nifty but underused devices that could have better served to create Brecht’s ‘alienating’ effect instead. Designer Karen Tennent‘s stripped back stage allows a view straight into the wings where clothes racks mix with resting actors, but we’re not pointed to it enough. There’s also some use of the theatre’s Circle in the opening scene, and again when a piece of tarpaulin is brought down to represent a glacier, that provides some satisfying momentary disorientation.
There are some sterling performances too, particularly from the older cast members. Christopher Fairbank is highly watchable, whether drunk and unpredictable as Azdak, or uptight and buttoned down as an escaping lady aristocrat. Deborah Arnott also excels when cross-dressing the other way as a randy and filthy-minded Sergeant. Crucially, Amy Manson puts in a beautifully understated turn as Grusha, the calm eye of the storm around her.
Not without merit, this production is nevertheless too cluttered to change people’s worlds in the way Brecht might have liked.