| Welsh Actor Professional Debut at Royal National Theatre |
Last of the Haussmans |
| Royal National Theatre Digital , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , October 30, 2012 |
Isabel Laughland plays fifteen-year old Summer in Stephen Beresford’s first play. She is stern in voice and tone towards her mother Helen McCrory’s Libby. She has decided she is bisexual and wants to move to the techno-rich home of her father in France. Taron Egerton’s Daniel, pool cleaner for the Haussman clan’s ample but run-down Darmouth home, is the opposite to Summer’s veneer of metropolitan knowingness. He is a keen swimmer and carer to a bed-bound mother. The two young people are akin to Evie and Cian in Gary Owen’s “Blackthorn” but with a difference. Sexual allure passes not between the two teenagers but upward across the generations. Taron Egerton last appeared on this site in November 2007. His absence has been due to the best of reasons. He has been at RADA. After debuting in Nick Hytner’s production he heads for the Royal Court. The camera sees the stage differently from the eye. Intensity of attention to the face is gained to the detriment of the impact of physical action. Taron Egerton’s character is by necessity halting, occasionally tongue-tied. His speech is reflection of his uncertain presence within a family beyond his own social background. He has a roll to his gait. He achieves an impressive array of unspoken emotion in a scene in which he consoles Julie Walters’ cancer-stricken matriarch Judy. It all changes when he finds himself a subject in her morphine-aided sexual fantasies. “Last of the Haussmans”, with its cadences of “the Cherry Orchard”, is structurally similar to “My Night with Reg.” It looks superb. For all the success of these cinema versions the camera is cruelly reductive of the visual image that the live audience sees. Vicki Mortimer’s magnificent set is simply not visible in its entirety. As for acting it is television that is seen. In the case of Rory Kinnear it works very well. He gives his character a nervy twitch, a tremor to his upper lip, a squeak to his laugh. Interestingly, his understated campery provokes laughter within the theatre that the camera does not convey outside. The character of Judy is intended as an embodiment of sixties unabashedness. She is liable to exclamations of “let's f--- off and take acid”. She admires a former lover in the frankest of terms. Even with the life force of Julie Walters behind her it does not feel real. Age brings vulnerability. A scion of a family, fallen from grace and wealth, contains to the end a complex inheritance of class and expectation. “Last of the Haussmans” has been subject to a ferocious critical assault from playwright. Doug Lucie. His central point, the sheer irrelevance of this set of characters to a twenty-first century Britain, is a forceful one. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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