BWW Reviews: OUR TOWN, Almeida Theatre, October 17 2014

Politicians seeking election do like a Town Hall-style meeting. You've seen future Presidents and Prime Ministers, striding about, speaking without notes, half the audience staring at their backs - but doing so photogenically, pushing the diversity buttons, applauding vigorously for the cameras. There's something of that artifice in Thornton Wilder's Our Town (at the Almeida Theatre until 29 November), the house well lit on a thrust stage as our narrator, clutching a legal pad, invites us into the unexceptionable New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners just as the twentieth century is finding its feet.

And in unexceptionable Grover's Corners, as one might imagine, unexceptionable things happen. Parents get their kids off to school; those kids grow up and get married; some townsfolk die. Nobody is very wealthy; nobody is very poor; and it's only in the third act that people start locking their front doors. If you're thinking The Waltons, so was I!

It's a slice of life with the history's big narratives held off stage - the coming of consumer society in the first Ford cars, the clouds of war gathering in 1913, the mobility of youth hinted at with the growing importance of education. Grover's Corners doesn't change much though.

In an ensemble piece full of committed, intelligent portrayals that lift the cookie-cutter characters into real people, Laura Elsworthy shines as Emily, the feisty teenage daughter of local newspaper editor Mr Webb (Richard Lumsden, in fine comic form). These days, Emily would be off to college with half an eye on an audition for The Apprentice, but 100 years ago, she was happy (maybe even relieved) to bag aspirant farmer George Gibbs (David Walmsley, earnest and tongue-tied) for a husband. Things should work out for them, but they don't.

Director David Cromer orchestrates his cast of 18 round the small space with some aplomb (as narrator, he can do this literally) and there's much to admire technically, but not everything works. The decision to give every member of the cast a different accent may well underline the universality of the lives described, but it jars and jars and jars. Geroge and Emily are hometown kids, but one speaks like Wayne Rooney and the other like Jessica Ennis - how did they go to the same school? Other characters affect Scottish brogue, RP and London voices which makes the New Hampshire town more like a cosmopolitan New Haven campus.

While lives unfold at a leisurely pace in keeping with the town's backwater status, not much happens and, in keeping with the author's statement that "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind - not in things, not in 'scenery.' ", there's not much to look at either (until a glorious third act vignette that comes too late and is gone too quickly). With two intervals in the two hours or so running time, there's a temptation to join in all the fourth wall breaking and ask everyone to get on with it.

With soap operas covering ordinary lives ad nauseum on television and Main Street Small Town USA rather distant from the hustle and bustle of Upper Street Islington, one can't help wondering why this play was revived in London in 2014. It makes for a pleasant enough and somewhat unusual evening in the stalls, but its intentional ordinariness in subject makes it rather, well, rather too ordinary I suppose.

Photo - Marc Brenner

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