This was brilliant. Theatre Alibi have staged Graham Greene's WW2 London thriller without losing any of the book's tension between tragedy and farce. There are only six actors, playing between them what seems like hundreds of roles, flicking rapidly between fortune teller, doctor, warden, spy with a twitch of a headdress and the flash of a pair of gloves.
It's slick, tense and hilariously funny and deeply sad. With all these characters and a plot like an electric eel, it would have been so easy to let it degenerate into a fun but fundamentally silly Pythonesque quick-change act, but the really impressive thing about this production was the maintenance of the quirky Greenesque balance between human comedy and human darkness. Chris Bianchi's Arthur Rowe was key to this: the one constant character on the stage, he carried us along with his guilt and joy and sorrow with the charisma and humanity of a true Greene small-time hero. And the whole production, like the book, is saturated with wartime atmosphere: sirens, rubble, radio and tasselled lampshades; the stage was littered with physical and acted manifestations of the incidental wartime losses that no one has time to mourn.
The set, an extraordinary hotchpotch of broken spars, scaffolding and occasional furniture, does as much as anything to conjure up a shattered London. The WW2 aspect is terribly real, and the incidental background crowd characters that flash across the stage are perfect: secretaries and soldiers and shopkeepers utterly realised in their brief moment, as if lit up for an instant by a flashlight.
On stage throughout are two musicians, providing an expressive jazzy soundtrack with clarinet, bass and saxophone. This, with some creative vocal input from the cast, manages to produce threatening air raids, troubling memories and shabby fetes with an accomplished bold wackiness that fits right in. The cohesiveness of the whole company is a delight.
Altogether, wonderfully creative, threatening, polished, lively, sad, funny and exciting theatre. I'd like to go again.
