“Road” at the La Mama Annex, is a play that comes out of depressed, Thatcherite England. Its author, Jim Cartwright, is said to have stitched it together in two weeks, after London’s Royal Court Theater, which had commissioned a play from him three years earlier, wrote to inquire how it was coming along. “Road” takes the audience on a night prowl through a Lancashire slum. Mr. Cartwright grew up not far from such a slum, in a working-class neighborhood near the Lancashire city of Bolton, where, before sending a number of dramatic sketches to the Royal Court, he held various unskilled jobs in factories that made cough drops and television sets. The point of “Road,” though, is that it could be set in any forgotten street in any city in the North—Bradford, Middlesbrough, Preston, Leeds. The script consists mostly of vignettes—brief monologues or exchanges taking place in the minds and houses of the people living in this dingy little street, whose name no one can remember.
The action is distributed all over the performance area, which has been dressed in the iconography of generic British squalor—brickwork and rubbish bins, layers of wallpaper, an old mattress, a junked car, poster ads, bits of furniture. Some scenes take place on the platforms that represent the interiors of houses, and some take place in the street. The audience has the option of sitting and watching from the sidelines above or joining the actors on the stage floor. In one house, a middle-aged man irons his trousers and reminisces about his time in the National Service; in a kitchen, a dotty old woman makes up her face. Sometimes we sit on the cracked pavement of Paul Brown’s set to watch a scene being played out; sometimes we stand, turning this way and that, as actors call to each other across the open space; sometimes the action of the play comes out to meet us as a skinhead jumps down to share his philosophy of life with the audience or two brassy young women stop to flirt with the local rummy, a retired sailor named Scullery, who acts as both chorus and tour guide. The characters alternate between acknowledging and not acknowledging the audience’s presence, while Scullery manages the crowd, signaling us to move now here, now there, and telling us when to sit down.
The play, which is being produced by the Lincoln Center Theater, combines elements of “Our Town,” “Under Milk Wood,” and “Balm in Gilead,” the Lanford Wilson play that made you weep for New York’s derelict dispossessed. Mr. Cartwright wants to make you weep for the down-and-out dispossessed in Britain’s industrial cities, and he does. He writes with a kind of unpatronizing emphatic genius, restoring humanity, on a small scale, to those from whom humanity has been wrested. Consequently, there isn’t a character whose feelings or situation you scorn. That Cartwright manages to convey the sameness of present-day urban poverty in Britain without ever being monotonous or banal himself is due partly to an interest in people for their own sake—as characters to be rendered rather than tropes or vehicles to carry a self-serving message—and partly to the kind of theater that “Road” represents.
London’s Royal Court has a long history as an outpost for innovative or controversial theater. It’s where Harley Granville-Barker, in the early years of the century, produced Shaw and shocking contemporary dramas from the Continent for a small segment of the educated public. It’s also where George Devine first produced John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” in 1956, thereby ushering in a whole new movement in British drama. More recently, under Max Stafford-Clark, who took over the theater in 1979, the Royal Court has been important less as a showcase for new writing (which is what it was under Devine) or for plays that nobody else would produce (which is what it was under Barker) than for its influence in popularizing a particular production style. It’s one that the Royal Shakespeare Company has adapted for use in its more experimental work—New Yorkers will remember it from the R.S.C.’s production of “Nicholas Nickleby” (adapted, incidentally, by a Royal Court playwright, David Edgar)—where the impression of a vast, milling world is created by having actors play many different roles. It’s not a style of performance that American actors, as a rule, are particularly good at; the transformational acting and quick-change voice mannerisms it requires do not come easily to them—partly because the American theater is influenced more by Stanislavsky than by Brecht, and partly because Americans don’t grow up exposed to twenty different regional accents.
The Lincoln Center production of “Road” is the first really successful realization of this kind of theater to be performed here by an American cast. Its director, Simon Curtis, who trained at the Royal Court (and for several years ran its experimental upstairs theater), has assembled a company of exceptionally able actors—Michael Wincott, Jayne Haynes, Kevin Bacon, Joan Cusack, Betsy Aidem, Gerry Bamman, and Jack Wallace—and instructed them in the techniques and production philosophy of experiment ensemble theater. The result is not seamless: there are problems here and there with individual speeches or performances. Mr. Bamman puts too much indignant passion into his early monologue about the National Service. (It would be more effective delivered deadpan, as all the soliloquies up to that point have been.) Mr. Wallace, playing Scullery, gives up all pretense of being English early on, which leaves him in a pickle when he has to deliver a line like, “Eee, I feel randy, me, now, you know.” But “Road” is an opportunity for New Yorkers to see why this sort of theater works and how it can be worthwhile.
In admiring Mr. Bacon’s versatility, or the loving precision with which Miss Haynes takes you into the mind of a bag lady and the heart of an upstairs-room floozy with a rhinestone clasp in her hair, or Miss Cusack’s ability to capture in several voices not only the accent but the rhythm and intonation of lower-class North of England speech—that half-monotonous, half-musical voice that goes just a half step flat at the top of each sing-songy phrase—we learn the pleasure to be had from watching an actor who has portrayed one character with authenticity and precision turn around and portray another character just as well. We see how that pleasure offsets the grim message of Mr. Cartwright’s play, and also how the device of multilevel casting sets in motion a system of implied links and juxtapositions, so that Miss Haynes’ bag lady becomes a prophetic projection of her upstairs floozy, and Mr. Wincott’s enervated skinhead a suggest of what his kickass young Eddie might turn into.
Given the high level of the production, it’s easy to wonder how much of “Road” is just the result of expert staging and performance. But there’s good writing there and a cleverness of design. Toward the end of the evening, for instance, there’s a moment when the entire cast appears, each in a different part of the theater; because until then we’ve only seen the actors performing in small groups, it’s thrilling. The scene is utterly contingent on British licensing laws—the fact that people in England go out when the pubs open and come home when they close—just as the play’s ability to project a culture of poverty is contingent on the fact that England really is full of small industrial towns that look very much alike. There are overwritten passages, instances of misplaced melodrama, and poetic expressions put in the mouths of people who wouldn’t conceivably use them; but there’s genuine music in the writing, too—like the music in the play’s title, a word picked up in the Northern expression “anyroad,” meaning “anyway” (as in “What’s out there anyroad, eh?”), so that the idea of possibility plays against a vision of entrapment. And there are refrains that we hear again and again from specific characters which are like the rhythms of a life that never changes, lulling a grieving community to sleep.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, June 27, 1988