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Review: Beachcombing

Beachcombing review As an audience we knew we were in good hands from the opening thirty seconds of beachcombing. It was probably the violence of Pink Floyd’s interstellar overdrive that announced the control and self assurance of Jack Clover’s second directorial foray. As the young Syd Barret continued his LSD fuelled riffing, the wonderful Will Stanford swam and generally scrambled around in a sea of a tarpaulin. This introduced the two other distinguishing elements of beachcombing. The first is the excellent cast, a truly fantastic ensemble that, like few others, exceeds the sum of its well-oiled parts. The second is the sea. It’s prominence in creating both a thematic unity and a presence against which the actors react made it the lynchpin of the play . The north sea and the surrounding Essex coast has been a source of fascination for Clover having featured in his last (cuppers winning) piece of writing. In Beachcombing the sea is witness to a delicate and meditative story about a priest James (Will Stanford) and a girl Amy (Aoife Cantrill). But is not quite a boy meets girl story. In the first place the boy arrives on the scene having already lost the girl (his wife) . In the second place James is in his mid fiftees while Amy is seventeen. They meet one desolate evening as James stares out into the sea, praying or monologing to his dead wife. Amy who is running away from home for the evening, observes him from behind a pew. She asks him to stay the night. A request which for some reason James accepts. It’s a decision which the other characters in the play soon come to find unacceptable and one which indeed on paper sounds a little suspect. But that would be to miss the point. There is no suggestion of pedophilia or undue conduct. Yet in spite of this, Amy clearly has an affect on James . She has some bearing on the memory of his dead wife, but we are never entirely sure why. Shortly after they first meet, we see one of James’s memories of his wife played out, with Aoife playing the wife. The play thus becomes as much about unraveling James and Amy’s relationship as it does about James and his wife’s. The possible connections are left to us to ponder. Accompanying this central story we have several interludes set to music. These very beautiful moments straddle the line between dance and physical theatre to express something of James’s marriage. The best thing about these was the music, it was such a pleasure to hear something other than ‘edgy’ music at the BT for once. Parallel to the James and Amy story is Amy’s own backstory. From the minute we begin to wonder why she showed up at the church at the time, we become ever more curious about what led her there in the first place. To tell this story Clover has enlisted two other equally excellent actors Fred Weinand and Alethea Redfern. Both do an exceptional job in multi rolling the various personalities that James and Amy encounter. Together they really conjure a sense of the quaint pettiness of the small village it is Beacombing is set in. They’re performances (and script) show just how much depth and atmosphere can be created with so very little. This was indeed a very beautiful viewing experience. The craft involved in the staging, acting and writing was top notch. My only fault with the play is its ending. In the end I’m not sure the plays says much about anything beyond itself and its characters. While that’s not really a fault, it did leave me feeling that something was perhaps ever so slightly lacking. But it’s a minor quibble in an otherwise exemplary studio show.

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