“emotionally heavy subject matter often relieved by astutely funny, bittersweet observations on female relationships”
The Silence takes us through the private musings and personal interactions of Ewa, Anna and Maria – three generations of Polish women. It’s hard to pin where the focus of the play sits, running over issues of national identity, the traumas of war and the infuriation of family. That sounds a bit hefty and dramatic, doesn’t it? Well, The Silence is both of these things but also light hearted at times with emotionally heavy subject matter often relieved by astutely funny, bittersweet observations on female relationships.
Kate Spiro gives a just-fraught-enough performance of the externally beige but internally chaotic Ewa, the mother and daughter at the centrepoint of The Silence in many ways. It isn’t an easy part to fulfil sympathetically and could quite easily come across as a standard middle aged meltdown figure. This is avoided with a real sense of tension, a visible tightness that makes one constantly on edge to see if she will begin to unwind or explode in a spectacular snap.
Tina Gray handles ‘babcia’ Maria quite sweetly, setting the audience up to accept the shambling, sweet-old-girl routine well enough to make the turn of the second act all the more hard hitting. Maria Louis completes the cast as Anna and absolutely nails the irritable but dutiful late-teen phase of the youngest generation of the family. All three dip into a not insignificant amount of spoken Polish which comes across quite naturally, a good job from dialect coach Karina Knapinska.
There is something of a stereotypical feel to the characters to begin with – bumbling grandma, middle aged mess and rebellious youth but these roles round out as the play progresses, Nicola Werenowksa has crafted the story of The Silence quite skilfully to take an extraordinary life history and make it relatable to a modern British audience. We go from tales of the Gulag to groans about the M25 seamlessly, seeing parallels in stresses and relationships since the WWII era without falling into the trap of belittling current woes by comparison to harder times.
The Silence is playing in the Studio at the Mercury Theatre, to which it is well suited. Three simple grey chairs make for the majority of the set with only a few other basic props. A high grey screen to the rear of the stage adds a looming bleakness to the atmosphere, cleverly used with a backlight later in the play to fill in time lost to a costume change. This is a play about conversations – conversations with ourselves and with others and the minimalist backdrop avoids any distraction from what is being said. It cannot be described as fast moving, though it flows very well despite the frequently overlapping dialogue of each character. This is helpful to the pace but does make it challenging to keep up with at times, more than once I found myself focusing on one and losing the thread of where the stories of the other two had gone. It is definitely a captivating play and although it is enjoyable at times one doesn’t exactly leave the theatre with a warm and fuzzy feeling. Touches of humour keep it from being completely depressing, however.
As a final note, it is refreshing to see an all female cast and creatives team telling an important story in a time when immigration, refugees and conflict commemorations are such hot topics of debate, so congratulations to director Jo Newman on the production as a whole.
“It’s not often a politically charged work of this type can feel so fluid and familiar and uninvasive to watch”
Europe After The Rain takes place in the sandbox of the soul that is generic Angry-Working-Class-Man Will’s back garden, in the aftermath of a world overturned by the withdrawal of the US from NATO and an impending British election. There is no escaping the comment on contemporary events and populist politics throughout this play – Brexit, privilege, rabid nationalism and Millennials vs Generation X angst are all here in buckets without much effort to disguise them. This could be dull, predictable even, but the movements of the characters through some touching confessions and conflicts pulls the narrative along nicely without becoming too dooming or preachy.
It is a skilful effort from writer Oliver Bennett to have pulled this off without falling into the realms of bleak end-of-the-world melodrama and despite touching on many political elements there is not really a sense that he is trying to influence your opinion on all these matters either way. There is a great sense of observation throughout, that one is watching an evolving event from several angles without needing to take a side, wave a flag or howl in despair. In fact, it is very funny on occasions, highlighting the foibles of modern British living with some astutely observed character based comedy.
Irritating, emotionally sketchy visitor Max (Simon Haines) in particular is perhaps a slightly too on-point embodiment of the worn down, over thinking thirty-something in severe danger of getting married to a boring desk job before being able to save the world from itself. Haines is engaging and full on, with a (hopefully) intentionally awkward performance that makes uncomfortable watching to begin with as he descends from being a bit weird, to rather tragically lost and insecure. James Alexandrou fits nicely into the character of Will – angry but needy, caring but entitled and progressively haunted by his own clumsy attempts to maintain his relationship with Yana (Anna Koval). Koval also does a great job as a surprising, and at times incredibly amusing, woman trying to get on with her present life as the men around her seem hellbent on focusing on either the horrors of the past or even bigger horrors of their imagined immediate future. There is a great contrast in the doom of the men waiting for what is to happen and the cheery abandon of Yana as she does her best to make things change for herself, no matter how small that change might be.
All in all, when the action is over it’s probably Marta you want to sneak off to the pub with afterwards. Natasha Kafka is the more understated of the players, taking on teenager Marta with a quiet confidence and increasing frustration throughout. It is a great performance from Kafka, allowing the audience again, through the strength of the writing, to enjoy and sympathise with the character regardless of how you feel about the social statement of powerless youth she represents on the stage. It really is the perfect example of a small ensemble cast without anyone particularly outshining the others, instead blending together comfortably to really make the action on stage work. It could quite easily have descended into a bit of a shouty drama (and there’s plenty of raised voices) but director Cara Nolan appears to have avoided this by keeping a sense of softness throughout the production despite the reasonably bleak subject matter.
The set is fairly sparse, and perfectly suited to the studio staging that I attended – namely a giant sand pit with some light interchangeable props. It is perhaps striking in its dullness, though this gives the chance for the audience to imagine that this illusion of the holiday beach could actually be any back garden outside of London – that these people could be anywhere facing these tribulations of love, loss, identity and self possession in a hard and inconsistent world. Indeed, they could be any one of us. The simple set and lack of flashy sound or lighting effects give it a comfortable flow despite the hefty themes at work in the foreground.
The real winning point, for me, is that at the time it feels like a simple, honest portrayal of four random and sympathetic human beings kicking around on a beach over a rough twenty four hours. The harder points in the background of the play – the painful legacy of being part of a democracy that makes inhumane decisions or the vanity tied up with Being A Good Person – don’t really hit you until afterwards. In fact it took me and my theatre buddy until some hours later to come to realise the meaning of a fairly massive point of the play, which I wont spoil here, and I think this is wonderful. It’s not often a politically charged work of this type can feel so fluid and familiar and uninvasive to watch.
