| Worth travelling many miles to see. |
At Hijinx Theatre |
| Hijinx Theatre- Estella's Fire , On tour , October 9, 2006 |
I am not a Dickens fan but the one book I remember is Great Expectations, and the reason is the presence of Miss Havisham and the enigmatic Estella who, you may remember from schooldays, said she had no heart.But this is Great Expectations with no graveyard, no Magwitch, no plot, no denouement, no social critique. This is Estella's story as imagined by playwright Louise Osborne, the fire that described in Hidden Flame, a poem by the seventeenth-century writer John Dryden, a secret love (for Dryden it had to be hidden, since the love poem is addressed to another man). Taking that claustrophobic prison, Satis House, from Dickens's novel, as the setting for this rich, complex and highly-charged tale of the journey from innocence to adulthood, Ms Osborne creates her own imagined world. Here the vengeful Miss Havisham teaches the pre-pubertal Estella to despise men and grooms her to inflict hurt as soon as she is sexually competent enough to beguile and destroy her lovers. The young Pip is introduced to give Estella some practice - or, rather, to let her meet her first male; Pip, though, is not just representative of his gender but of the outside world, a boy who can describe the smell of apples, the sight of ships setting out to sea and corn waving in the breeze. As Estella falls in love with the boy so she wants to escape from Miss Havisham's dark, bitter world. Her surrogate mother gives her a ruby and diamond necklace; Pip gives her a string of shells smelling of the sea, some smoothed driftwood, a gull's wing, a shell which replicates the sound of the waves. Material wealth or the free experiences of life ? It's Ms Osborne's first play as Hijinx's new Associate Director and it's by far the best community show the company has done for ages - thanks not just to the script but to the production team, which reads like the dream company of Cardiff theatre of the 1980-90s. It's directed by Ros Hutt, who cut her teeth with Hijinx before moving to London to run the Theatre Centre, and she is backed by the music of John Hardy, the Louise Bourgeois-influenced design of Jane Linz Roberts and the technical experience of Ian Buchanan – and, as she admits, her staging is in some ways a homage to those groundbreaking groups working in Cardiff then, like Paupers Carnival, Moving Being and Brith Gof. The play itself is also beautifully written – inspired not just by Dickens’s novel (or at least a small part of it) but its Kentish landscape which Ms Osborne knew at first hand as her childhood home. It may be a play that only a woman could have written, especially as it shifts the emphasis from Pip’s rites of passage to Estella’s maturing, but it is by no means exclusive. Essentially it is about not just negotiating a bitter distortion of the relationship between men and women but about desire and freedom. Ms Osborne is well served not just by her production team, who translate the poetry and imagination into at time magical theatre, with a marvellous set of cages and screens, but by her cast, with a stunning Zoe Davies as Estella and some fine performances from Stephen Hickman, Caroline Bunce and Lizzie Rogan. I caught the production at its opening at Whitchurch High School, Cardiff, but it has a lengthy tour in England and Wales, ending at the Millennium Centre in December, and is worth travelling many miles to see. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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