REVIEW: Now This Is Not The End, Arcola Theatre ✭✭✭

Now This Is Not The End

Arcola Studio Two

5 June 2015

3 Stars

In the case of an organism like the London Theatre, which has so many limbs and tentacles all moving independently, generalisations are usually rash. However, one such that seems to hold water at present is that there are many more good actors than there are good plays in circulation. With so many acting schools in operation and so many actors from abroad coming here for work, it is no surprise that the standard of acting is high. Indeed in the last few months of concentrated reviewing I have rarely if ever felt tempted to give a truly negative review to an actor's performance. However, when it comes to plays the standard is much more variable. Time and again I have come across work that has many bright ideas or impressive individual scenes, but overall has been released to the public too soon. Part of the problem must lie with the fact that these early drafts have been developed in workshops dominated by actors, with their local priorities, rather than under the forensic eye of a dedicated dramaturg who has a brief for overall structure that rises above the colourful local detail of individual scenes - strategy rather than tactics. If there were one thing I could change in respect of new writing it would be to raise the numbers and status and remuneration of dedicated dramaturgs. Then we might have more new plays that cross the threshold from promising and gifted to finely crafted and fully fledged. These thoughts were much in mind at the premiere of Rose Lewenstein's Now This is Not the End currently playing in Dalston. While the acting performances are all creditable or more than that, the play ends up being no more than the sum of its often stimulating parts.

We find ourselves looking at a raised parquet platform with a few chairs and a suitcase half-packed. On the back wall a few strips of architrave light up now and then and some electronic music putters away in the background. Rosie (Jasmine Blackborow) and her German boyfriend Sebastian (Daniel Donskoy) are arguing over whether or not Rosie should return from Berlin to her home in London to resume life with her parents Susan (Wendy Nottingham) and Paul (Andrew Whipp). At intervals the voicemail delivers repetitive messages from Rosie's German-born grandmother Eva (Brigit Forsyth) whose grip on independent life seems to be slackening together with that of her second husband Arnold (Bernard Lloyd), like Eva a German-Jewish refugee. In the scenes that follow the action pursues a number of time-slips backwards and forwards from 2002 to the present day, and gradually through the fog of Eva's encroaching Alzheimer's and a taped conversation of memories we eventually get to learn much of the family backstory. Eva and Arnold are both originally from Berlin. Eva escaped arrest but lost both parents, one to a concentration camp, the other to estrangement, and after a time with her grandparents, escaped to England and a new life. Her daughter, Susan, is a nervous control freak still wrestling with questions of personal identity, and her grand-daughter wants to remain in Berlin to explore her own sense of belonging through a search for Eva's roots. Arnold wishes simply to forget rather than remember, and does his best to destroy the key tape which Eva has made about her past history. Paul, Susan''s husband does his ineffectual best to keep the peace.

This then is a play about memory and a sense of homeland, and the inter-generational consequences of the Holocaust and Jewish Diaspora. Clearly this is well-trodden ground and anyone approaching it really needs to calculate a new, oblique angle of approach in the way that - for instance - The Hare with Amber Eyes was successfully organised around the history and travels of the netsuke collection owned by the family rather than a full-on narration of the personal fate of the people. There are indications of such an approach here focused on the different meanings and experiences of the untranslatable term Heimat or 'homeland', but it is never fully sustained across the play as a whole. Moreover while there are many intriguing connections developed between the six characters none of them really catch light or come to a resolution, so that at the end we are left with a frustratingly inconclusive trajectory. Not that there is anything wrong in leaving plot-lines open-ended, but in the end we are simply not given enough material to care about any of the characters and how they come to be who there are, despite the best efforts of the cast.

Among the cast members the women have the better developed roles. Donskoy and Whipp do their best with the very limited opportunities presented to them, and Lloyd is excellent as the choleric elderly Arnold, determined not to look back but filled with unexpressed inarticulate rage about the past which explodes every now and then within the family circle. Blackborow's role goes in and out of focus frustratingly, but she has good moments of emotional empathy with her increasingly incapacitated grandmother and some well sustained sections of jousting and confrontation with her parents. Nottingham is excellent in conveying Susan's unfocused nervous energy and ready sense of emotional panic that makes her both sympathetic and unbearable in equal measure. However, the most finished character is Eva and here Forsyth, a very experienced actor of real empathetic charisma, finds the most depth. While there are still points at which the elements of her character do not fully cohere, she is very successful in conveying Eva's genial surface and inner coldness and reserve. It is a genuine insight to suggest that one of the hidden consequences of the Holocaust was the removal of the ability to trust and commit after the event, and more could and should have been made of this. The same too could be said of the fact that we have moved from an era of concealment to an era of remembrance. As Eva says, 'Everyone told us to forget about it. Now we're all dying and everyone wants us to remember.' The play suggests but never fully explores the notion that that the focus on commemoration can be more of a fetish than a true or honest reckoning. Now there we have a really intriguing subject.......

Now This Is Not The End runs at the Arcola Theatre until June 27, 2015