‘Wherever you come near
the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense…’
In a plight to challenge what he saw as the ‘soothing’
content of theatre in the late twenties, Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ attempts
to strip away the ‘layers of nonsense’ surrounding humanity.
True to this vision, Tim Sullivan’s adaptation
successfully captures the trivial and mundane acts of the villagers of
fictional New Hampshire village, Grover’s Corner, and encourages the modern audience
to celebrate and affirm the everyday.
Relayed in three acts, the play progressively transports
its audience twelve years through village life, from teenage tantrums to the
after life, and didactically emphasizes the importance of appreciating what
usually goes unnoticed in our day to day existence.
The stage manager (Simon Dobson), acts as the plays
narrator, at times interrupting the play with ‘that’s enough of that’ and fast
forwarding the action by a year. Most significantly,
the stage manager’s role is to make the audience aware of their own relevance
to the plays content; Dobson urges his audeince to ‘try and remember what is
was like to be very young’.
Sullivan’s (lack of) setting creates a panoramic view
of Grover’s Corner, encouraging a focus on humanity, relationship and routine and
stripping theatre to its bare essentials, as Wilder himself claimed, the play
‘needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life
means to us’. In Savio(u)r’s production, this comprises of a few tables and
chairs, the inventive use of ladders to create a Shakespearian balcony scene
between the plays’ young lovers, Emily Webb (Zoë
Swenson-Graham) and George Gibbs (Stewart Clegg) and the consistent and
convincing use of mime.
Admittedly, the ‘five square feet of boarding’ is
achieved at the Kings Head, making the need for fourteen actors seem at times
cramped and unnecessary, however in the second act’s wedding scene, the theatre’s
floor-level stage makes the audience not a observer of a play, but a guest at
the character’s wedding. In the King’s Head you feel that you are not part of
an audience, but a fly on the wall to the emotional moments of reality, and the
stage manager, your tour guide.
This intimacy makes the final act of the play the most
moving. Zoë Swenson-Graham brilliantly acts
the return to earth after her death to painfully watch her twelfth birthday,
powerless to interrupt her life and uncomfortably deciding to return to the
grave in favour of a world where everyone fails to recognize they are living.
The play is tragic, painful and moving, but beneath
its initial bite, it is hopeful and above all, life-affirming. It is these
ingredients that Wilder felt were becoming abandoned by 1920s theatre, and
precisely these qualities that are respectfully kept alive by Tim Sullivan.
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