“It’s BBC policy to face up to reality,” says producer Mercy Croft as she outlines the corporation’s new directions of travel to June, the actor whose popular radio soap character she has just axed. There’s a particular poignancy to the timing of this revival of Frank Marcus’s 1964 play, just as the Beeb’s local radio stations are being hit by cuts. The clipped efficiency of Patrycja Kujawska’s Mercy, praising June’s portrayal of Sister George even as she kills off the character, feels painfully contemporary.
This sort of blurring between fact and fiction is at the heart of Marcus’s comedy. The hard-drinking June has become so identified with the twee district nurse serving the fictional village of Applehurst that she is now known as George, and frequently speaks in character. June/George lives with the seemingly sweet, naive Alice (whom she calls Childie), and her collection of dolls. (That this is a lesbian relationship is presented more explicitly in Robert Aldrich’s 1968 film adaptation.) Hayley Carmichael’s brusque, intense George appears ruthlessly to bully Ada Player’s timorous, helpless Alice through rituals of domination and submission. However, a revelation towards the end suggests things are not as they seem. Ultimately, only the couple’s clairvoyant neighbour is what she appears to be (exuberantly realised by Rina Fatania).
For this co-production by the New Vic and Told By An Idiot, director Paul Hunter addresses Marcus’s theme of reality/unreality by playing with the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Domestic scenes in the women’s flat are accompanied by onstage foley effects created by the four actors, sometimes still in character. Individual audience members are brought into the action. Lots of gags raise plenty of laughs. But something is missing: emotional engagement. Characters, treated as comic constructs, come across as two-dimensional, in spite of the best efforts of the cast. In highlighting the realities of the staging, Hunter obscures the human complexities explored in the fiction.
