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Soap to tackle all your stains
IF I WERE A CARPENTER
Pentameters Theatre
SOAP opera with a social conscience is the hook of Dougie Blaxand’s new play.
Three northern families in three short acts struggle to hold themselves together in the face of the ruthless pressures of capitalism. Their lives are interspersed with short rhyming “interludes” satirising various powerful institutions. Soaps, with their “real, everyday people”, make it their job to address the “issues of the day”. This play does it with a bolder agenda than would ever be allowed on EastEnders.
The canvas is broad. We have the middle class, upper class, lower class, UCAS, universities, students, trade unions, and the government. The themes are definitely big: inequality, pragmatism versus idealism, and the philosophy of education. Most importantly, the melodrama is high: financial pressures, split loyalties, drinking, gambling, stealing, pregnancy, self-destruction and suicide.
The trouble, however, with addressing so much is that it’s too tempting to revert to the easy shot, the simplistic notion and to make the characters subservient to the ideas.
That said, a talented and energised cast give a much needed urgency to a great deal of material. Natalie Radford, and Paul Hampton, playing children in each family, give particular gritty weight to their soapy stock characters. Andrew Harrie’s inventive staging contrasts the grey, grim living-room dramas with the playful theatrical interludes, creating a sense of a big, messy complicated world.
It’s a heavy script, but a light-footed production, admirably ambitious and performed with genuine compassion.
Until October 21
020 7435 3648
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