25.07.1996

Exotic squatters

Breon James reviews White unto harvest by Mavis Howard, directed by Lisa Goldman

The latest production from the Red Room completes a short season of plays collectively titled ‘Coming to land’. The plays share common ground in the depiction of characters marginalised by society: squatters, graffiti artists, travellers. This ground that the playwrights cover reflects the growing publicity attracted by pressure groups engaged in high-profile campaigns against the repressive legislation of the Criminal Justice Act.

However, the writers have shown a tendency to exoticise their characters, situating them either in the isolation of impromptu abodes (abandoned tube trains, an amusement arcade) or in colourfully didactic opposition to stereotypical middle-class liberalism.

White unto harvest falls into the latter camp. A successful professor of history and his family allow a group of travellers to stay on their land which is leased from the local squire. The conflicts that ensue between the family, the squire and the travellers form a plot through which an attempt is made to debate the land and property rights issues which concerned the Diggers at the time of the English Revolution of 1649 and which concern travellers and squatters today.

This conflict itself is not without interest, unlike the crudely sketched characters upon which it is hung. The travellers are an improbably motley crew comprising a gibbering idiot; a whirling dervish runaway teenage girl; an elderly wisewoman; and their leader, a self-educated anarchist prophet, matching the professor quote for quote from Digger writings. The professor is a watered-down liberal seeing life as if it were the stultifying prose in his history books, and the squire is a stock aristocratic villain. Consequently, any polemical force which might have been generated in the debate between the characters is stalled by having to operate in the two dimensions they inhabit. They look to be drawn not from life, but from bad television.

The plot is further slowed down by some clumsy intriguing between the squire and the professor’s woefully stupid graduate student. More insulting to the intelligence is the shockingly glossed over (off-stage) rape of the teenage runaway which seemingly results in her transformation into a cleaner and less manic person.

Despite the limitations of the script the large cast perform well, keeping the slow pace steady at least. The set and lighting design are impressive, but neither is enough to overcome the shortcomings of the characterisations and plot.

Breon James