The sad dwindling of the Greenwich Theatre from a producing house you really wanted to visit to a receiving venue you’d go out of your way to avoid  was given a short reprieve in my estimation on Friday night when a touring production of The Hired Man by Melvyn Bragg and Howard Goodall came to call.

The show was ecstatically received by a nearly full house of good local folk who comprise an audience far in excess of the theatre’s deserving. There is no front of house reception to speak of. The bar area has been transformed into a soulless, student-style refectory with hideous canned music and horrid furniture. Drinks at the bar come in plastic beakers.

I met a friend half an hour before curtain up and he took one quick look and said he’d rather die than stay here. Instead of death we chose the marginally preferable Cafe Rouge over the road. I’m not at all sure that we followed the right option.

Still, the place had a pleasant enough buzz far removed from the theatre’s musty, institutional barrenness. I toyed with an orange juice while my friend orderd a “plateau rapide” — which, of course, duly arrived too late to eat. It was sent back.

Over twenty years after its premiere in Southampton and the West End, The Hired Man remains a compelling oratorio, a great love story, a superb social document of a vanished England and, above all, a fantastic example of scenes being stitched into songs which then wrap themselves back round the narrative.

Goodall’s bountiful, beautiful score includes marches, anthems, even an ironically syncopated waltz during the war scenes, ballads and a foot-stomping fox-hunting item that should be adopted as a theme tune by the Countryside Alliance.

The bare-bones show is discharged with great musical distinction by the Nottingham-based New Perspectives company, who are New York-bound with it as part of the annual Brits-Off-Broadway season in early June.

New York drooled over the stripped-down approach of John Doyle’s Sweeeny Todd and has enthusiastically embraced the Menier Chocolate Factory’s starkly imaginative Sunday in the Park with George. Could it be the turn of this bravely basic The Hired Man next?

The Brits-Off-Broadway supremo is New York-based Scottish expat Peter Tear, who runs the delightful East 59th Street Theatre where the festival happens. The theatre has one large but intimate auditorium and two smaller studios, and is brimming with Brits from early April onwards — which is why, Peter tells me, he’s virtually on the wagon until they all arrive.

Much merry is made in the cosy little bar after the performances — which kick off with David Greig’s Yellow, followed by the same author’s Damascus in early May, both from last year’s Edinburgh Festival programme at the Traverse.  
        
 

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.