Pictured : The ensemble (top), Phoebe Campbell as Grusha (middle) and Jonathan Bray (Year 13) as Yussup (bottom)
Senior Production
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Mr Richard Sutton and Miss Maggie Jarman
B recht’s Georgian morality tale of the chalk circle is part-satirical debate and part-epic parable on themes of heroism, entitlement and choice; it is also in the estrangement tradition of the high avant-garde, treating its historical subject matter allegorically. Finally, it is a human story of motherhood and marriage founded on tragi-comic medieval folk myths. The imagined synthesis of these disparate elements is confoundingly difficult: how to harmonise the intimate with the universal, the pathetic and the political, or in the Director’s own vision, how to counterpoint the possession of land against the ownership of children. The director here was Kathryn Norton-Smith, assisted by Emma Prendergast, who hauntingly distributed the words of the Singer (the narrator) from Brecht’s original script amongst the ensemble chorus, enhancing their musicality as the tale unfolded, right from the opening ‘Once upon a time’ as Tom Marchant ringingly compelled the audience to attention. So skilfully had she recreated Brecht’s script that its simple complexity meltingly moulded the tale around Grusha Vashnadze. She is the servant who has nothing in the way of finery but a certainty of moral right and love so strong that she cannot leave the silver-spooned baby to the revolution. The fragility of Grusha was penetratingly and honestly portrayed by Phoebe Campbell and Rosa Collier (on alternate nights), both keenly aware of the steel beneath her skin. The brilliance of this Senior production lay most breathtakingly in fearless overlaying of visual elements. First, there was inventiveness with props where suitcases, symbol of the displaced and the dispossessed, skilfully became barricades, receptacles for the Governor’s Wife’s wardrobe, doorways, snow-blown mountain passes, shields. Then there was the lucid ingenuity of fluid staging within a vast dystopian arena, expansive enough for epic yet viscerally poetic when it needed to be. This allowed the terrific, 40-strong cast multiple opportunities to probe the dark interstices of the Edward Alleyn Theatre, emerging from psycho-physical gloom into the fragile torchlight of anti-realism, achieved by Carol Morris’ eloquent lighting design. The whole piece was hauntingly accompanied by the evening’s great unseen character: Oscar Maguire’s thrilling score,
which contained original music by Andrew Storey. In an ensemble as powerful as this, devising many moments for itself, the totality is thrilling; yet from it emerged vignettes of striking clarity. Slipping from cameo to cameo with seamless ease, Thomas Boutelle, Will Joynson and Edward Reid, together with Marcus Kottering as the Fat Prince, Patrick Hughes as the downtrodden yet sympathetic servant at the inn, and Luke Bliss as the cruel Blockhead, cannot be passed without particular praise. There are named characters, too, of which Ollie Norton-Smith’s spineless Lavrenti and Cameron Forbes’ Corporal Shotta prowled with predatory menace. Hamish Lloyd Barnes’ comedic inebriated Irish monk and arrestingly autocratic Grace Bryan as the fur-clad Governor’s Wife were masterful. Most breathtaking of all these assured performances was that of Alex Holley as Azdak, the drunken judge whose verdicts hold more humanity than the statute book on which he sits. This was a performance so expressive, so empathetic, so intricate that it transcended the parameters of school production and was made all the more thrusting by Miles Dee’s exquisite foil as his faithful clerk, Shauva. Michael, the child abandoned by his aristocrat family and adoringly reared by Grusha, fascinatingly transforms as he grows from inert doll to toddler puppet to real child, played in turn by two DUCKS pupils, Fraser Pelly and George Howard, with disarming calm. In the final scene, Michael is placed within the chalk circle, and the timeless dilemma: ‘I reared him! Should I rip him to pieces?’ Our emotions were wrung from heartbreak to hope of happiness as the child from one end of the College was hoisted onto the shoulders of Simon (Theo Forbes) from the other. These were actors committed to a wonderful heightened language of visual and aural story-telling: ensemble acting at its most memorably disturbing yet hauntingly beautiful. In one extraordinary moment of contemporary choreography, they were all suddenly a flesh-bridge of arms, knees, torsos and bent heads: the production’s most radiant evocation of the precariousness of destiny and the ache of modernism. Such electrifying images of kinetic stillness demand self-discipline, insight and unwavering belief in a shared aesthetic; such were the hallmarks of this outstanding production.
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