Passion Play

The curtains opened onto the living room of Eleanor and James.  There was a short flight of stairs up centre, leading to a raised 'landing', which in turn led to the offstage bedroom. There was a front door stage right of the stairs, from which a narrow hallway lead into the living room. This gave the characters a long entrance onto the stage, and this was used to good effect to create tension as the audience could see who was entering before the onstage characters. This generally worked well, apart from one or two occasions when the actors had trouble manoeuvring past each other in the narrow space. There was a door right to Eleanor's music room, and an exit right to the offstage kitchen.  Furnishings were in keeping with the period and gave the appropriate feel of middle class affluence.

The bare, undecorated left side of the house was initially confusing, but it became clear in scene 2 that this area represented all the other locations in the play, including restaurant, cafe, hospital, Kate's flat etc. On such a small stage this was a good idea; however, the need to bring on furniture and props at each scene change slowed the action considerably, and inevitably affected the pace of the play. It was also quite distracting when the action was continuing elsewhere on the stage. For example, the rotation of the flat in Act 2 to form the dressing room and the need for the clothes rail to be brought on, made for quite a cumbersome scene change. When using a composite set like this, it is quite acceptable to pre-set furniture for different scenes from the very beginning, or to use minimal furniture and props which suggest the new scene. This allows the audience to imagine the different venues and settings, with perhaps only minor adjustment from backstage crew, or even simply from the actors themselves.

Lighting changes can also really help the audience to focus on the correct area of the stage, as well as changing the mood and helping to change the scene, but the lighting changes were quite minimal; for example, the lighting was left up on the restaurant scene even though the action had switched to the house.  A lighting change for the dream/nightmare sequence in Act 2 would have clarified this scene.  There were also a lot of shadows throughout on the back wall.The use of the fore-stage as the art gallery opened out the action nicely, with some excellent ensemble work, and this is one example of where the scene change was aided by the actors and worked well.

Scene changes were accompanied by choral music, which was fitting given Eleanor's love of music; however, the number and length of scene changes meant that the music became rather repetitive by the 2nd act. Sound cues eg. door bell were well timed. Costumes were good, with real attention to detail; in particular Kate, whose outfits really displayed her status and personality. I wonder if the alter-egos costumes could have reflected more of a difference from the main characters? Props were appropriate and handled well.

In this play each of the two main characters is played by two actors: the 'public' face or 'persona', and the alter-ego or hidden thought processes behind the 'mask'. As the play progresses, the alter-egos appear to take over. There were some lovely moments of interplay between the pairs; for example in the art gallery when Jim is voicing his need for Kate to notice him, accompanied by fleeting (and quite painful) glances from James; also,when Eleanor is (apparently) calmly reading her husband's love letter to Kate, whilst Nell fidgets and squirms behind her, betraying the discomfort that Eleanor is hiding from her friend. At other times however, there seemed to be little connection between the character and his/her alter-ego, and I felt it should have been more obvious that they were two sides of the same person, especially when the alter-ego voices became more persistent in Act 2. Perhaps movement or physicality between the two aspects of the person could have aided this, as well as varying the timing and delivery of lines in response to the 'thought' delivered by the alter-ego.

It could be argued that it is unfortunate that the premise of this play, whilst a clever idea, robs the central actors of the chance to voice the depths, doubts and feelings of their characters, giving these roles instead to two other actors, resulting in a tendency for the characters to appear somewhat one-dimensional, making it difficult to elicit any real empathy for them. There is no doubt that this is a challenging play to perform, and I applaud the decision to stage it.

© NODA CIO. All rights reserved.