Acting With Honour: 3 short plays

BitterSweet again serves up three short plays (collectively titled as Acting with Honour) all over and applauded in just 90 minutes.  It’s an entertaining, undemanding form with writers achieving clarity and impact without wasting words or worrying about the furniture.  It also requires actors with similar skills and who don’t resort to mugging or signalling to the audience.

J.M.Barrie wrote The Twelve Pound Look just after the Great War, about a pompous man about to be knighted (Dimitri Armatas), his beautiful, bullied wife (Charlotte McKee-Wright) and the unexpected return of his first wife who’d absconded years ago and is now a typist.  Julia Burns plays her with sunny confidence and suffers her husband’s boorishness with good humour.  The pauses between them fails to hint much at their long history – and remaining affection – but the play, while gentle, ends with a timely feminist appeal. Sarah Carradine directs and the Edwardian costuming is splendid.

More a sketch than a play, in Joyce Carol Oates’ Procedure we see a senior Nurse A (Andrea Blight) instructing an inexperienced Nurse B (Charlotte McKee-Wright) on how to prepare the corpse (Brian Carbee) in front of them for the morgue.  The details of removing pyjamas, washing, arranging the body and stuffing every orifice are all done and ticked off. Nurse A makes quizzical observations about the body but B remains severely professional.

Only outside does B reveal to A her relationship with the corpse, and the deadly finality of that. Oates, now 88, came from a poor American family background punctuated with murder and suicide, and was herself in suicidal grief when her husband died. She has written a lot about death and, with director Sarah Carrdine, in Procedure the actors scratched that deep vein even in a sketch this short

Also now 88, Steven Berkoff’s Purgatory is a deliciously funny satire about a “resting” classical actor, John, booking a room in Betty’s boarding house.  Betty (Tricia Youlden) is acerbic drilling the poor actor about his limited success and why he isn’t on the telly, or doing something useful.  As John, John Grinston looks sad and dour but is untouched by these cultural barbarians, leaping (as Berkoff would approve) around his room reciting quoting Shakespeare. 

Ted (Marty O’Neill) shouts obscenities from the next room, but from another room comes an artistically-inclined spinster Sarah (Gina Willison) who swoons at how John gives voice to Shakespeare’s words.  This cast is uniformly strong and director Richard Cotter keeps it moving physically and through the comic beats.

Martin Portus