Lloyd Evans
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Then the play snarls up. We shift to rural Ulster and get a sequence of lengthy speeches elaborating the characters’ back stories. Dramatic momentum dies. It doesn’t help that McGuinness’s love of the soliloquy isn’t matched by his skill in deploying it. He then takes his carefully sketched characters to the Western Front where he abandons their differing contours and lets them congeal into a mass of braying egos honking ‘Ulster, Ulster, Ulster,’ as they prepare to go over the top and rush the German machine-gun posts.
McGuinness is a lifelong enthusiast of Greek tragedy (uh-oh!) and his desire to create Great Emotion, Great Oratory and Great Art prevents him attending to the basics. All we want is a coherent drama. He doesn’t deliver. The production’s prime asset is Richard Dormer, one of the most versatile and watchable actors of our time, whose skills are extremely well suited to the role of the lovable silver-tongued charlatan, Pyper. What a shame his character has no satisfying narrative path to follow. The play is best understood as a piece of memorabilia from the mid-Eighties when it was written. At the height of the Troubles everyone assumed Ireland’s slow-burn civil war would go on for ever, and to understand the Ulster mindset wasn’t just absorbing but necessary. McGuinness brilliantly evokes the blood lust, the blind hatreds and loyalties, and the psychotic fixation with the native soil that motivates the militant Ulsterman. But these themes have scant relevance these days with the IRA army council happily employed by the Crown and the Protestant gunmen filing their Lugers into fishing reels.
Carrie’s War, a memoir of childhood evacuation in the 1940s, is a peculiar choice for high summer in the West End. Pensioners old enough to recall the evacuation tend to shun the theatre. Creaky hips, hearing aids, chicaned spines, leaky bladders. Don’t ask. The light-hearted script has plenty of charm. The refugees are shunted off to the Welsh valleys and dumped in the home of a terrifying Baptist shopkeeper, Mr Evans, who thumps his bible and swindles his customers. His cowed wife does his bidding automatically. ‘The carpets are new. Mr Evans doesn’t like them trodden on.’ Sion Tudor Owen strides and swaggers and booms enjoyably enough as the fiery fundamentalist. Prunella Scales, playing an elderly matriarch, gives an oddly muted performance. She whispers the lines of her dying character in a ghostly rumble, like the last notes of an emptying bath. Virtually inaudible.
The adaptation of Nina Bawden’s novel is a restless and unrhythmic affair. The plot turns on a complex tiff between two siblings whose houses are built at opposite ends of the stage so the action darts to and fro across the boards, like a ping-pong match. Instead of a true piece of theatre we have a film-script on stage. It works — just — but you emerge feeling stuffed rather than full, as if you’ve been whisked at top speed around a series of finger buffets when you wanted to relax and savour the slow and easeful ceremonies of a banquet.
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