Noel Coward’s ‘Mild Oats’ and ‘Still Life’
Tour De Force Theatre Company
Llangwm Village Hall, Pembrokeshire
This evening, anyway, it’s seems hard to believe that this is the village long infamous throughout Pembrokeshire for stoning visitors at the drop of a Welsh cake.
This evening, anyway, Llangwm ripples with the distant shouts of children larking and chasing and gambolling on the hard-baked baize of the rugby field where drowsy gulls flap nonchalantly away but only at the very last minute from the approach of the unblinking, deaf-mute groundsman on his mower as it chugs its slow, slow, relentless way back and forth, leaving puffs of exhaust fume suspended in its wake to mingle with the delicious wafts of wild garlic.
This evening, as their dogs stew silently at their feet, forgotten, pensioners loll about gassing, warmed to contentment by Friday’s setting sun, supported by a riot of sticks and frames and low paid Eastern European carers, while a swarm of dragonfly swishes happily here, there and everywhere through the air on unseen thermals, unnoticed, like a shoal of tipsy, silvery fish; and bees hover in the hedgerow above the musk mallow and meadowsweet, heartsease and lady’s bedstraw fully absorbed in their moment.
This evening, once more, as it has done for 900 years, the church bell beckons what remains of the doddery, hypnotised faithful even though the vicar, sporting dog collar, shorts and flip flops, has been parked for quite some time now outside the village hall, her ruddy, pollen-tickled face sneezing like that of a bubonic pit pony between gasps of slurped chardonnay and snatched snippets of local gossip.
It’s hard to believe that only a few steps past this vicar, inside this village hall, inside Llangwm village hall, of all the remote places on God’s scorched earth, we are to be charmed silly by an evening of Noel Coward. Here… in Llangwm.
Hard to believe because the performing company is no local am-dram society, no well meaning Women’s Institute group where the prompt ends up stealing the limelight from the wings and the audience starts looking at the clock 5 minutes in.
No, this is the Tour De Force Theatre Company, professional and experienced and talented and… well, here… tonight… in Llangwm.
The confusion of raffle tickets blends into the tang of total sun block and the smiles and guidance of the kindly ladies of the parish who will later serve interval cheese and wine, or, if you prefer, metallic tasting tea (at a pound a mug); and surrounded by the ghosts of raspberry jams, church fund-raisers, and Victoria sponges (that just give to the touch), the audience is creaked and shoehorned into their seats.
An old lady in the second row coughs quietly into her handkerchief. The grumble of the mower outside fades. The lights are dimmed.
Then, all of a sudden, it really is happening.
As musical accompanist Rob Marshall uses all his international concert experience, not to mention the pickpocket nimbleness of his fingers to coax flavours from the quavers of the clank and wheeze of the village piano, Adrian Metcalfe and Jessica Sandry appear from behind a makeshift partition as the ‘He’ and ‘She’ of Coward’s ‘Mild Oats’.
And for the next 23 minutes of this gorgeously slight piece of froth hold us spellbound while they weave their quiet magic on a stage that makes a penny black seem as roomy as the village bowling green.
‘Mild Oats’, an early Coward, penned in 1922 when the author was but 23 and here adapted for the stage by Metcalfe himself, raises those themes that will later be developed (later this evening, in fact) in his more famous plays, films and songs, but is untypical of him in that both the comedy and poignancy depend not so much on the dialogue as they do on the situation itself, on the gaps and silences, on the stomach-churning awkwardness.
The play was not performed at the time of its writing and has not been seen too often since. It takes skill to make it work and fortunately Sandry and Metcalfe show such skill playing two complete strangers who have defied the conventions of society by casually picking each other up and returning to ‘He’s’ apartment.
We may be close enough to them to check for mercury fillings but, under the direction of David Robertson, and with a lovely lightness of touch, they take us away to another time where every glance, every wince, every wide-eyed smile of horror, and every aborted gesture or word intensifies their lather of barely suppressed terror.
In their fever of timidity and remorse at the enormity of what they have done, not a move, not a look, not a word is wasted; timing and pace is Swiss clock perfect allowing us to revel in their hilarious choreography of self torture right up to the marriage proposal blurted out at the end and intended as a lifeline from turmoil and disgrace.
We loiter in this other, clipped and mannered, gentile world, the lingering last gasp of the black and white Victorian era with its gas lamps and Bath buns, for ‘Still Life’, the second play, meatier and better known than Mild Oats and, of course, the inspiration for one of the greatest films ever made, David Lean’s ‘Brief Encounter’.
The strains of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto are dissolving into the audience anticipation when Sonia Beck joins Metcalfe on stage as the respectable, middle class, suburban housewife Laura Jesson who, though married, is about to fall in love with Metcalfe’s Dr. Alec Harvey (also married) following a brief encounter at a train station cafe, an encounter which will eventually lead to their increasingly desperate and doomed, passionate but chaste affair.
Beck oozes excellence investing her role, like Metcalfe, with such freshness and authenticity that the film becomes a shadow at the back of the memory. And that really is saying something.
Both make the audience feel like voyeurs or eavesdroppers at the next table in the cafe, guiltily unable to do the decent thing and turn away from the rawness and power of two people living in their one short moment, together for the last time.
For anyone separated forever from their one true love at a train station, permanently stained, as train stations are, with the horror of their casual punctuality and final demands, the huge indifference of the universe stalking their every platform, it is almost unbearable to watch.
Beck and Metcalfe also shift impressively from their cut glass accents loaded with guilt and passion to their slap-and-tickle, parallel relationship of Myrtle Bagot and Albert Godby, the café manageress and station manager, who inhabit the same, uncomplicated, parallel world as Sandry’s gawky waitress Beryl Waters (seen handing out biscuits to the audience before the start of the play).
Coward paints these gor’blimey, we-know-our-place characters with a very broad brush indeed: at times it seems as if they’ve just read a government training manual on how pre ‘50s working class British people should speak and behave.
But the quality of the acting means that what we actually hear is welcome light relief from the intensity of Laura and Alec’s love; what we see is the counterpoint of a hard, practical world in which their love appears ever more fragile and impossible, a world which must to them seem the Platonic embodiment of the material suddenly becoming immaterial, transforming into the grotesque and meaningless.
Even though most of us know the outcome, by the end of the performance we’re utterly transfixed, suspended in time and space, the collective breath so baited that when someone in the back row drops a half-nibbled Welsh cake you can hear it.
Yes, you know Dolly Messiter is on the way, of course, but you can’t help hoping that surely this time the couple will be allowed to savour their last precious minutes alone.
Just when you think the coast is clear, though, Messiter barrels down the aisle onto the stage from the back of the hall, her incessant blathering simultaneously puncturing, intensifying and framing Laura and Alec’s last moment together.
You can almost hear Celia Johnson saying,
“I wish you’d stop talking. I wish you’d stop prying and trying to find things out. I wish you were dead – no I don’t mean that. That was silly and unkind. But I wish you’d stop talking.”
Less snide and knowing than Everly Gregg’s film version, exhibiting a more bulldozing style of insensitivity, Sandry’s Messiter is so believable that when the lovers’ iconic hand-on-shoulder farewell comes it takes superhuman self-restraint to resist jumping up out of the audience to apply some extra strength duct tape, enormous self control not to then bundle her roughly into the boot of a car that will roar off to a lonely pit and the waiting shovel.
Under the direction of David Robertson and to the musical accompaniment of Rob Marshall, Sandry, Metcalfe and Beck have served up a gem of a performance, an immensely satisfying Cowardly treat at the end of the working week.
And in this evening of seamless transitions it is entirely appropriate that, even before he is able to take one step backstage to change, Metcalfe is shanghaied into compering an endless raffle draw while the scenery is dismantled around him.
Celia Johnson’s words,
“There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this anymore. No, no! I don’t want that time to come either. I want to remember every minute, always, always to the end of my days,”
echo in our minds as the summer evening outside gradually creeps back in like the tide, life continuing indifferent, washing away the memory of the lovers.
Soon it’s as if they were never really here at all.
Under an enormous, pink-orange moon that fills the sky like a miracle, past the vicar, now engrossed (from behind her pub window spectacles) in the devouring of an almond Magnum, the audience drifts off full of satisfaction, phantoms into the night, purring about this, that and the other, and also about the man who first put Llangwm on the map, Mr W.G. ‘Buddha’ Thomas, late and great of this parish.
Yes, the birds are preparing for bed and for one brief, dreamy moment all seems well with the world.
Even that group of stragglers over there is blissfully oblivious of the young tykes giggling and camouflaged on the bough of the nearby oak, and the volley of pebbles skimming the air with silent venom towards the back of their tender, bony skulls.
By Tim Barrett
Photograph: (from left to right) Sonia Beck, Jessica Sandry and Adrian Metcalfe
