Chichester
Pitcairn: Richard Bean
Minerva Theatre,
Chichester Festival Theatre,
Oaklands Park
Chichester, West Sussex PO19 6AP
Mon-Sat 7.45; mats 2.45pm, Wed, Sat (exc mat on Thurs Sept 11, 2.45pm)
Audio described perfs: Fri Sept 12, 7.45pm; Sat Sept 13, 2.45pm.
Runs 2hrs 30mins incl 20 min interval
Runs at Chichester till Sept 20, then Shakespeare’s Globe, then touring.
TICKETS: 01243 781 312;
Concessions 16-25yr olds, £8.50 at all perfs
On-line: www.cft.org.uk
Review: by Carole Woddis of performance seen Sept 6, 2014
Theatrical, demanding, theatrically demanding, and worth all you can give it.
Pitcairn, a rocky outpost in the South Pacific and since the 18th century, the home of mutineers and their ancestors from the Bounty. The ship once led by Capt Bligh but taken over by Fletcher Christian has been the subject of any number of accounts.
Richard Bean (One Man Two Guv’nors, Great Britain and the soon to be unveiled musical, Made in Dagenham) has now provided us with another. Arguably the most prolific playwright in the country, Pitcairn shows him hardly running out of juice.
It’s a big, rumbustious kind of play, directed by Max Stafford Clark for his Out of Joint company in collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe that certainly doesn’t lack ambition. Imagining what might have occurred between the mutineers landing on Pitcairn with Tahitian women, half a dozen Polynesian men and a child in tow and their rediscovery two decades later, it’s a story of disillusionment and idealism destroyed.
As if a companion piece to Our Country’s Good, Stafford Clark’s other famous account of first settlers, drawn by Timberlake Wertbenbaker from Thomas Keneally’s account of Australia’s penal pioneers, once again Max Stafford Clark has fashioned a telling theatrical production out of the debate, no less gripping in our own time, of how to balance utopian visions of equality and fairness with human drives of greed, violence and jealousy.
Fletcher Christian is the idealist pitting himself against a rabble of rough sailors and the strange and sexually open ways of the Tahitians and Polynesians. Bean has some wonderful fun with such divergent sexual mores – perhaps not fully appreciated by a Chichester audience but no doubt seized upon with glee when the company visit Shakespeare’s Globe.
With a heady mix of intellectual debate, audience participation and ethnic dances, Stafford Clark’s young company produce an entertainment that demands a good deal of them (and sometimes us) but gives us a thoughtful drama not least in its picture of female dominance (and violence) before a denouement that reveals only one mutineer left standing amongst a harem of women.
Recent history has shown the Pitcairns heavily scarred by accusations of child sexual abuse. This is a picture of what might have been before the inevitable Fall.
Part of Chichester’s Hidden Histories season.
Hidden Histories talk and panel discussion, It’s All In The Telling,Tues Oct 7, 5.15pm
Cast:
Te Lahu: Lois Chimimba
Quintal: Samuel Edward-Cook
Fasto: Vanessa Emme
Hiti: Eben Figueiredo
Mi Mitti: Siubhan Harrison
Te’o: Saffron Hocking
Ned Young: Ash Hunter
Menalee: Naveed Khan
Mata: Cassie Layton
Walua: Anna Leong Brophy
Fletcher Christian: Tom Morley
John Adams: Adam Newington
William McKoy: Henry Pettigrew
Oha: David Rubin
William Brown: Jack Tarlton
Director: Max Stafford Clark
Designer: Tim Shortall
Lighting Designer: Johanna Town
Composer: Adam Pleeth
Choreographer: Orian Mitchell
Sound Designer: Emma Laxton
Video Designer: Andrzej Goulding
Casting Director: Gabrielle Dawes
Associate Director: Tim Hoare
Assistant Director: Jake Smith
Fight Director: Jonathan Waller
Dialect Coach: Richard Ryder
World premiere of Pitcairn in the Minverva Theatre, Chichester, Aug 22, 2014
More details, see: cft.org.uk
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2014-09-09 09:56:48
