REVIEW: The Flannelettes, King's Head Theatre ✭✭✭✭✭

The Flannelettes. Photo: Francis Loney The Flannelettes

King's Head Theatre

19 May 2015

5 Stars

The Flannelettes come to the King’s Head Theatre as part of its 45th anniversary celebrations. The play re-unites Richard Cameron and Mike Bradwell, the team that had such a success at the Bush with The Glee Club (2002) and similar works. It shares many similar qualities with its nationally successful predecessor: a setting in a depressed Northern town, populated by tough or exploited women and violent or ineffectual men; where music fills the huge gap between the rough circumstances of everyday life and the aspirations and longings of the soul within. The curtain goes up on a Tamla Motown tribute routine in a Miners’ Welfare Club, which introduces us to five of the six characters in the play – Brenda (Suzan Sylvester), a widow who runs the local women’s refuge; her niece, Delie (Emma Hook), who is aged 22 but with a mental age of a decade younger; Roma (Holly Campbell), her older friend and the much-abused girlfriend of a local gang-leader; Jean (Celia Robertson) an educated Home Counties woman, recently arrived at the refuge, and George, (Geoff Leesley) a genial but faded local pawnbroker, gamely dragged up to make up the numbers. They are joined later in the scene by Jim, (James Hornsby) a married Community Police Officer, who it turns out is having an affair with Brenda. The opening number is part of a regular act, and its tone of soaring romantic aspiration coupled to a sense of remorseless and inevitable disappointment sets the pattern for the play as a whole. The characters do their level best to escape from an apparently preordained set of predicaments and then rehearse or perform Motown numbers as a choric commentary on the violence and despondency that threatens to overwhelm them. Lest that seem both a familiar and static scenario, let me say immediately that each of the many scenes is beautifully crafted so that the first half establishes rich and deep characterization from which drama of raw power emerges in the second half. These are detailed performances where many tiny points of text or mannerism or gesture come back to hit you with fresh significance on the second time of asking and notice. There is a delicate balance between comedy and pathos that keeps on oscillating and shifting until a decisive dark turn in the final few scenes which are played with great grace and skill by all concerned. While there are outstanding performances I have to single out in this review, it is above all an ensemble success, where the writer ensures, like an opera librettist, that each of the characters is given effective solo spots, and duets of contrast before participating in ensembles of real energy, wit and – where necessary – anger. All of the actors are strong and distinctive; and for all the enveloping sadness of the end, it comes over as a very happy production that leaves the audience feeling that an affirmation of life is taking place as well as a forensic examination of an abyss of abuse.

Part of the reason for this sense of balance and for the overall success of the production is the focus is very much on the individual development of character rather than on the schematic attribution of blame. There is no dogmatic thesis in play here: the socio-economic decay of the mining town is a given, a grim backcloth not a political agenda. Not that there would be anything wrong with that in the abstract, but it would make it a very different play – a David Hare approach would not fuse with the primal cry of the soul deployed so movingly here. Fundamental to the action is Sylvester’s careworn, unillusioned, endlessly patient and accepting portrayal of Brenda. She is the calm emotional centre of the play around whom the other characters revolve, and to whom they return. It would be easy to turn this into a caricature of a stalwart stoic Northern woman but she does not miss the opportunities she is given to reveal her own disappointment and emotional damage. There are moments of touching vulnerability in her interactions with the two men in the cast in particular that are very affecting. Alongside her in the refuge, Robertson ably conveys Jean’s journey from traumatised battered wife through to feisty resistance and recovery despite the loss of her family – really the only character who ends the play in a better psychological place than before. The two men – George and Jim – are more difficult to bring off because of the consistent, sapping sense of failure in their characters – George has the best of intentions, genuine kindliness and empathy, but diminished energy and ability to carry things through; Jim has energy but little emotional understanding, whether of himself or others. Both fail to comprehend the disastrous consequences of their own actions for the women in the refuge. Power resides still with men either weak or (offstage) thuggish and manipulatively abusive. Both actors manage to make these men sympathetic even though the emotional tug and drift of the play is to set up a threnody for and of women.

But the stand-out performances undoubtedly rest with Holly Campbell and Emma Hook. For most of the action Campbell has to play a woman with no self-esteem left who is either recovering from or about to receive more physical abuse. She captures the hollow-eyed, numbed quality of the perpetual victim very economically and without sentimentality, while preserving a different voice and personality for her hopes of a home of her own. In her scenes with Hook their mutual recovery of a space for hope is very moving. Delie, though is the focus of the audience’s attention whenever she is on stage. She plays her character with innocence to be sure, but with many other layers too: the tunnel vision and relentless curiosity of a child with abundant energy but misplaced trust comes across powerfully in the first half; and in the second, as the darkness closes in around her, bafflement, incomprehending pain and desperate desire to retain some kind of secure anchor in the adult world begin to take over and you see the outlines of a performance of real grandeur. Her monologue in the final section of the play is one of the two or three best moments in theatre I have experienced this year; one of those times when the audience is entirely in the zone with the actor and all extraneous considerations are stripped away.

This play is a worthy tribute to all that the King’s Head stands for. Do catch it if you can in its final days, and I can only hope it comes to another stage very soon.

The Flannelettes runs at the Kings Head until 6 June 2015