Brighton Beach Memoirs (Watford, Palace Theatre)
Families are the bedrock of most cultures. They are also a fruitful source for the material of plays. Watford’s revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon is a marvellous example of this. Both acts are set in the evening, during early September 1937, a time when the thunder of persecution rumbled in far-off Europe adding further disturbance to the second- and third-generation Jewish incomers living in Brooklyn and as worried about their own financial security as the physical threat to relations in Poland and Germany.
The Jerome house is already one of divided rooms; there’s a widowed sister and her two daughters living there as well as Kate, Jack and their two sons. Seven is a crowd when money is tight. What will happen if relations escape the Polish ghetto and arrive in America? At what level does dependence become a two-way burden? What constitutes maturity? Which matters most – physical health, a united family, an assured income, mutual understanding, moral principles?
Eugene, 14 years old going on 15 is the insider presenting an outsider’s view of his family and the social microcosm which it represents. He introduces us to the other people with whom his life is still so entwined, alternatively judging with all the passion of a frustrated boy with conflicting ambitions, including the rival claims of baseball, writing and sex, with what is still a two-dimensional view of other people but which matures as he gradually recognises that life is multi-layered. It’s an extremely energetic and utterly credible performance by Ryan Sampson.
The other three young people are Eugene’s four-year older brother Stanley (Ronan Raftery) and his two girl cousins – Nora (Sonya Cassidy) who at 16 has show-business aspirations and semi-invalid Laurie (Amy McAllister) who is just entering her pig-tailed teens. All three give subtle portraits of young people with inherent weaknesses which they begin to learn how to turn into strengths over the critical week of the action.
Sisters Blanche Morton and Kate Jerome have an uneasy relationship which is brought out but not laboured over by the actresses who play them. You can believe that Cate Hamer’s Blanche was once a beauty but has had her vitality sapped though widowhood, ill-health and the difficulties of being a permanent guest who cannot pay her way. Tessa Churchard blends the archetypical Jewish matriarch, queen of her household, with the cares and attitudes of the new type of society into which she has been born and which she must wrestle into the shape which will allow her family to flourish. Education (or at any rate a certificate for it) is seen as the key to that particular treasury.
Stephen Boxer makes much of Jack, a quiet man with a good heart in the metaphorical sense and a weak one in the physical. Again, it’s a nuanced performance which blends into the ensemble but is never subdued by it. Director Jennie Darnell has brought commitment as well as immense skill to her staging, aided by Jonathan Fensom’s crowded multi-levelled set – though you’d be advised not to sit at the ends of the rows if you want to see all of the action all of the time. It would be a great pity to miss any of it. This is a very fine production indeed.
