Justin Nardella Archives - Page 3 of 4

The Sugar House

Finborough Theatre

Reviewed – 5th November 2021

★★★★

“it’s hard to find fault in this production. Forceful, despairing and, I don’t mind admitting, quite tearful”

In light of this week’s #FreeLunchGate, I’d first like to say I was given a small plastic cup of house white at the beginning of the show. Despite this glamourous perk, I will do my best to give a balanced and fair review…

The Finborough Theatre is not a large theatre. In its current layout, it can seat 40, maybe 50 at a push. So to have a cast of six for such a little audience feels very exclusive, particularly after the seeming endless spate of one-person plays in the last year. It’s a real joy to see a full cast interacting, laying out their various intimacies and tensions. The stage is pretty tight, but The Sugar House is a family drama, and the small space only emphasises the family dynamics, sometimes chaotic, sometimes conspiratorial, the audience sat right in the lap of the action.

This is ostensibly a story about the Macreadies, a working-class family in 1960s Australia who are struggling to get out from under, set against a backdrop of Australia’s last state execution and a long unending fight against police corruption.

But it’s universal in its particularity, exploring problems of generational poverty, endemic hypocrisy and modern society’s love of destroying the old in favour of the new and expensive. And at its core, it’s about how painful and drawn-out real change necessarily is.

Director Tom Brennan has brought together a strong, scrappy cast. Everyone carries a double-edge of deep misery and wry humour throughout the script, and though I’m no expert in Australian accents, I didn’t hear a single bum note throughout, something I’d otherwise find incredibly distracting.

Janine Ulfane, playing the grandmother, gives an especially complex performance. Her character is loveable but deeply flawed, and Ulfane deftly explores all the varying shades between. Jessica Zerlina Leafe, playing the granddaughter Narelle, carries the main weight of the play, opening in the ‘present day’ as an adult, morphing in to her eight-year-old self in the ‘60s, eventually becoming an angry belligerent twenty-six-year-old in the ‘80s. It is a little bit jarring watching an adult play an eight-year-old for nigh on an hour, but given the quick changes and multi-decade-spanning timeline, I can see why Leafe has to play the child as well as the adult.

Justin Nardella’s design is necessarily simple, but doesn’t feel at all lacking. A white brick wall with a mulled window acts as both a versatile set-piece and a projection wall, showing footage of Ronald Ryan, the last man to hang in Australia, as well as the cogs and wheels of the old sugar house, where Narelle’s grandpa worked, and various other titbits. A desk and two fold-out chairs serve any other prop requirements for the most part, leaving space to focus on the cast whose number already nearly clutters the stage.

There are no superfluous scenes, or boring chunks of dialogue, nonetheless, writer Alana Valentine could do with cutting twenty minutes, just for pace’s sake. Otherwise, it’s hard to find fault in this production. Forceful, despairing and, I don’t mind admitting, quite tearful.

Reviewed by Finborough Theatre

Photography by Pamela Raith

The Sugar House

Finborough Theatre until 20th November

Other review from Miriam this year:

Tarantula | ★★★★ | Online | April 2021

Reunion | ★★★★★ | Sadler’s Wells Theatre | May 2021

My Son’s A Queer But What Can You Do | ★★★½ | The Turbine Theatre | June 2021

Lava | ★★★★ | Bush Theatre | July 2021

The Narcissist | ★★★ | Arcola Theatre | July 2021

Aaron And Julia | ★★½ | The Space | September 2021

White Witch | ★★ | Bloomsbury Theatre | September 2021

Tender Napalm | ★★★★★ | King’s Head Theatre | October 2021

Click here to see our most recent reviews

★★★

“Horváth’s story oozes dread and suspense, both of which were lacking this evening”

Christopher Hampton, the West-End’s go-to translator whose adaptation of Florian Zeller’s “The Son” is currently playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre, has turned his hand to Ödön von Horváth’s 1938 novella “Youth Without God” (‘Jugend ohne Gott’). First published the year of his untimely death, Horváth’s novella is a stunning meditation on complicity and justice under the early years of Nazi rule in Germany. Hampton has been faithful to a fault, in a way that leaves this production feeling a little lacking.

Originally a first-person narrative, we follow the nameless Teacher (Alex Waldmann) whose class of teenage schoolboys are introduced as hot-headed, propaganda-spurting youths. After trying to oust their teacher for his insistence that “Africans are humans too”, the boys are sent off with him for military training in the mountains. Free to roam the woods, one boy (Raymond Anum) begins a clandestine affair with a young orphaned girl (Anna Munden), and events quickly spiral out of control with one classmate ending up with a stone to the temple (Malcolm Cumming) and the other on trail for his life.

All this is told ostensibly from the teacher’s perspective, using narration and reported speech to detail the events. This would not be a problem, but Waldmann’s fairly under-energised performance means he doesn’t quite bring us on side, and he remains an impassive and emotionally stunted character throughout. Hampton has translated great swathes of text for the Teacher, but more needs to be worked out between writer, director and actor to differentiate between narrated and lived-in moments. Why is the Teacher speaking to us at all? Knowing the book, the translation feels a little unimaginative at times. As a published text, fine. On stage? It gets quite dry.

Director Stephanie Mohr has some intriguing ideas that feel blocked by a heavy and dominant text. Chalkboards frame the stage and become trees, doors and a canvas for the boys and their teacher to write on. Dolls’ heads and school chairs end up littering the stage, but much of the business comes across as style over substance. The eleven-strong cast seems a bit over the top, given that three actors play multiple roles while the others get away with one. David Beames stands out for offering a dose of energetic oddness amongst the doom and gloom.

Taken altogether, the potential of the text is sadly left drifting in this production. Horváth’s story oozes dread and suspense, both of which were lacking this evening. Some moments had potential to shock and disturb, but the overwhelming emotion at the end of the night is a shrug rather than a shudder.

Reviewed by Joseph Prestwich

Photography by Tristram Kenton