If there is one thing you can count on from The Manchester School Of Theatre, it is their choice of obscure, little known or performed plays. This evening was the opening night of their short three-day run of yet another play of which I had no prior knowledge, Nick Stafford's 'Luminosity'.
It is a 90 minute play written to be performed without a break, and makes for a rather compelling watch. The play opens in the present, in the greenhouse of a large family house as the mother and her adopted daughter have a rather estranged conversation. The play then jumps about in time to show two moments in this family's history: first to the exact same spot in the year 1799, and second to Kimberley in South Africa in 1899. The adopted daughter of the present questions why her white parents chose to adopt a black African girl, and starts to look into her family's history. As she does so, and as we see these intertwining vignettes of the past play out before us, we see that their understanding of their family and its history isn't excatly truthful nor as moral and as upstanding as they were lead to believe.
Ultimately the play questions what amount of our undestanding of history we can accept as being true, and, what is truth? Are there different versions of truth , of history? And is it not better to let the past be and not try and accuse the past of crimes based on our contemporary beliefs and societal mores. The final few lines of the play include perhaps the line which signals the whole point of the play, 'Is history a straight line?' - and it is neither a black history nor a white history, and although the play does touch upon racial discrimination, it does so in terms of what was deemed acceptable in the eras mentioned.
The directing, by Roy Alexander Weise, was very 'arty', and gave the cast strange movements to do when exiting from a scene or being used as 'ghosts' to either fill the stage with condemning faces or to simply change the set. Some of it could almost have been said to have been a dance, and much of the directing lacked gravitas. The words in this play are heavily weighted and poignant, and I suppose then the temptation with any actor - as they tend to do with Shakespeare - is to try and make every word have a depth of meaning and get clogged up in procastrination and metaphor and speak every word as if it was doling out pearls of untold wisdom; and Weise obviously wanted to dispense with this and instead chose a much lighter approach, and a more naturalistic approach to speaking the dialogue. The main problem with this naturalistic dialogue approach was its lack of audibility. I was straining to hear Freya De Wild's Margaret and couldn't hear Xsara-Sheneille Pryce's Debra at all until the entrance of Ben Bubb's Robert when the dynamic of the scene lifted considerably. Weise did manage to bring in some much needed humour to many places in this script for which he needs comending, for without it I feel it would have been a very heavy and hard watch indeed.
The cast of 11 had some extremely talented actors in their midst, and as an ensemble the entire cast worked excellently and cohesively. Back in 1899 in South Africa and the three cast members who brought these scenes to life were excellently potrayed and very realistic. Harry Mace's youthful ebullience pitted against the more forward and worldly advances of Eloise Westwood's Victoria [with an almost perfect accent to boot!] whilst some sardonic humour came from their perfect foil, Sam Black's Skilton. Whilst in 1799 the roles of both Saul Mercer and John Gardner [Dylan Brady and Conor McCready respectively] were both chilling and remarkable.
Credit must also be given to set designer Abby Clarke and although I personally didn't like the use of film projection onto the greenhouse, it would have been a stronger play without resorting to multi-media style presentation, the rest of the set and costuming was very authentic-looking and worked very well.
These students are in their final year at The Manchester School Of Theatre and this, for some, will be their last public performance before graduating. It is an enormous learning curve for them all, and it always impresses me just how professional these plays are. I look forward to seeing some of you at Nell Gwynn later this month.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 16/5/19
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