Review: TABLE Shares Over A Century Of Hopes, Heartaches and History Held In the Best Family's Humble Handcrafted Piece of Furniture

Tuesday 30th July 2019, 7:30pm, Reginald Theatre Seymour Centre

Tanya Ronder's TABLE holds the secrets of the Best Family in this intriguing and inventive expression of the old adage 'if this table could talk, the stories it could tell'. With a clarity and detail that feels like a true story, this incredible story exposes the history of six generations, 115 years and over 7,000kms that have been ingrained in a humble family table.

A simple six seater solid timber table holds pride of place on a simple black stage (set and costume design by Isabel Hudson) where lines of solid stage legs lead in to the central focal point. A precocious child in pink tutu and headphones sings Cantonese songs and plays whilst a scraggy blonde man seeks to make her understand the importance of the table which she is one day destined to inherit in the hope that she will not dispose of it in favour of some soulless factory manufactured flatpack fabrication. With care and attention, the generations connect and the stories of the "cacked up" table, from scorch marks, stains, gouges and graffiti, come to life.

Presented predominantly in flashback, from the present day 2013 gathering, the history of the Best family is presented in connection to the table created by Su-Lin Hillier Best's (Nicole Pingon) Great, great, great grandfather David Best (Brendan Miles) in 1898 as a wedding present for his bride Elizabeth (Stacey Duckworth). The cast of 9 cover the Best family along with the friends and significant figures that shaped their journey from Staffordshire to South London by way of Tanzanian Missionary outposts to Hertfordshire hippie communes to expose potentially inherited trauma that potentially has no hope of being eliminated if the past is not acknowledged and understood.

Hudson's costume design remains as simple as the staging with the cast wearing casual street clothes with simple additions of jackets, tutus and veils to delineate the changes in character with the simplest change being Julian Garner's mussing of hair to shift from the older Jack and Gideon to the child Gideon railing against his mother. With such sparse visual clues Nate Edmondson's sound design and musical composition helps set the scenes whilst also creating a family theme of sorts. A traditional English folk tune transports the story to Lichfield whilst a percussive military rolls sends Finley Best (Mathew Lee) off to the First World War. Tribal beats signal Sarah's position as a Novice sent to the Tanganyika mission and Cantonese pop songs welcome in Anthony Best (Mathew Lee) and Ben Hillier's child born with the help of a Chinese surrogate.

TABLE is a beautifully woven story with a strong cast capturing the highs and lows of the family. Whilst some chapters of the family story are relatively short, others linger with family members longer. As Sarah, Stacey Duckworth creates the image of a girl growing from the goody two shoes twin sister into a soul that never really finds her place, potentially damaged by the events of her childhood with a philandering father, dictatorial mother and a rebellious brother. Julian Garner's portrayal of a father desperate to connect to a child he have never met, a son constantly searching for a father no one will speak of and a father wanting a new connection with his family he had left to go searching for something missing is captivating in his expression of both sides of the relationship. Chantelle Jamieson, as a range of peripheral characters, expresses the importance a welcoming nun and a free-feeling hippie have had on Sarah and her son whilst Danielle King conveys the damage an absent husband unable to let go of the past has had on a mother that wants to feel a family unit.

Captivating and convincing, TABLE is a thought provoking work that prompts people to consider the memories tied up in objects and whether this tradition will continue in the disposable commercial age of mass production and consumerism.

https://www.seymourcentre.com/events/event/table/

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