Modern British Playwriting: The 1980s by Milling Jane; Boon Richard; Roberts Philip

Author:Milling, Jane; Boon, Richard; Roberts, Philip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Jim wrote them for those people, what he saw. Charles – actually played by Charles Simon – was a fantastic guy, very dapper, sartorial, polite, had a little bit of the womaniser about him – I think he had quite a young wife – a flirter but a real English gent, so everything that was in that character was coming from his own personality. Vivienne Burgess, who played the Spinster, her nature wasn’t quite as hard as the character’s, but she had a very sculptured face, very birdlike. She was tiny and slim but bright-eyed, and Jim worked with that to find this sort of dry severity. John Boswall who played the Captain had a beard, was very physical, a King Lear type, evocative of the sea – and his big boats speech during the storm came from there.

Scattered throughout with individual monologues from these characters, ranging from the intimate to the fantastical, the text retains Cartwright’s familiar balancing act of grappling with the pain and soulfulness of the past while delighting in the joy of remembrance. These speeches also have a structural function, offering moments of consolidation with a singular focus: islands of solid ground within the floating, free rein of a dream world.

The structure of the original studio material, described by Bardsley as ‘a wonderfully rough scrap of a thing, a sketchy piece with a couple of mattresses and a big duvet’, had required revisiting when the National Theatre’s artistic director Richard Eyre offered the chance to produce the play but on a very tight turnaround. A week of redrafting, development and discussion between director and writer in a room in Bolton was quickly implemented before rehearsals began. The decision to produce came when another programmed show had been pulled from the intended schedule; the whole process of Bed being developed from scratch, shared at the Studio, redrafted, designed, rehearsed by the cast and eventually produced at the Cottesloe took place over only three or four months. During the week in Bolton the characters of The Couple were introduced to the play, bringing with them their glass of water odyssey to create ‘a more cohesive piece rather than static little vignettes’ and Cartwright introduced the Sermon Head as the disruptive insomniac who could be threaded through the material. Both choices were about lifting the material to a production level, providing a stronger dramatic arc that could sustain a whole evening rather than just an informal sharing in the confines of the Studio.

This pressure to move towards production in only a short amount of time was reflected in a quickly constructed stage design, dominated by the huge bed and eiderdown and mountain of dressing tables and armchairs. On reflection Bardsley wonders if the design was ‘aesthetically slightly too fantasy … it lacked a bite or a disturbing kind of vision’, referencing the Beckettian nature of some of the material that occupies a darker, grittier world. Isabel Arro’s review of 15 March 1989 in What’s On in London referred to

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