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Synopsis On a startlingly bright Autumn night in 2006 Harper Regan walked away from her home and her husband and her daughter and she kept walking. She told nobody that she was going. She put everything she ever built at risk. For two lost days and nights, until it looked as though her entire life might unravel, she didn't turn back. From Uxbridge to Stockport to Manchester and back again, Simon Stephens' new play navigates the UK, exploring family, love and delusion; and how to live in a godless universe.
Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens’ new play Harper Regan premiered at the National Theatre last Wednesday (23 April 2008, previews from 19 April), directed by NT associate Marianne Elliot and starring Lesley Sharp in the title role (See News, 16 Jan 2008). It runs in rep at the NT Cottesloe until 9 August.
The play tells of how, on a bright autumn night in 2006, Uxbridge housewife Harper Regan walks away from her home, her husband and her daughter and keeps on walking. And for two lost days and nights, until it looks as though her entire life might unravel, she doesn’t turn back. Harper Regan explores themes of family, love, discovery and delusion, as its ever-present titular character struggles to deal with a series of personal crises.
Writer Simon Stephens, a former resident dramatist at the Royal Court, won best new play at the 2005 Laurence Olivier Awards for On the Shores of the Wide World, which also had its London premiere in the NT Cottesloe. His follow-up, Motortown proved a critical success in 2006. Known for his authentic and often brutal studies of working-class life, Stephens’ other works include Bluebird, One Minute, Country Music and Pornography.
While overnight critics were somewhat lukewarm in their response to Harper Regan, there was almost unanimous praise for Lesley Sharp’s in the title role. Sharp, who remains onstage throughout, was described variously as “wonderful”, “stunning” and “deserving of awards”. However, despite the strength of Sharp’s central performance, many critics had reservations about the play's “artistically misjudged” use of graphic violence and often “meandering” narrative.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (four stars) – “Is living in Uxbridge such bad news? The titular heroine of Simon Stephens’ compelling new play Harper Regan in the Cottesloe, prompting a magnificent performance from Lesley Sharp, is a character in crisis, out on the edge, poised in flight from her job, her husband and her daughter… This quality of fateful, mysterious ambiguity and anxiety is superbly conveyed by Sharp, who has the rare knack of making you feel exactly what the character is thinking without spelling it out... Marianne Elliott’s production, eerily designed by Hildegard Bechtler as a series of interlocking locations in an impersonal landscape, reaches a moment on transfiguration at a future point in Harper’s story, but there is no real resolution. You realise, in fact, that the play has been a story of expiation, and that Harper has gone through the mill just as much of telling what happened as of allowing those events to overtake her. And the sad, slow hum of Lesley Sharp’s performance is the best explanation of all.”
Benedict Nightingale in The Times (three stars) – “There’s a class of drama in which baffled, alienated characters go on walkabout to discover their own and life’s meaning: the oppressed businessman who gives Mamet’s Edmond its title, the New York protagonists of Howard Korder’s Lights, and now Harper Regan in Simon Stephens’ play of that name… This gives the excellent Lesley Sharp, who plays Harper, plenty of opportunities to display her ability to be sweet, naive, apologetic, angry, despairing and much else. But for the first half this isn’t quite enough to sustain a meandering narrative... Harper’s obsessive curiosity about everything brings some good, offbeat writing out of Stephens, especially in scenes in which the woman stalks and quizzes a puzzled black student nicely played by Troy Glasgow. But there are plenty of other quirky moments in Marianne Elliott’s production, some involving Michael Mears as Harper’s nerdish yet sinister boss, others Susan Brown as her mother, a prissy Alan Bennett northerner who asks the play’s basic question. Has she squandered her life on pointlessness? Yes – and maybe many of us do the same.”
Michael Billington in the Guardian (three stars) – “Modern dramatists, I have often claimed, lack the will or capacity to write star parts: a charge that Simon Stephens emphatically rebuts in a play in which his eponymous heroine is never off stage. The result is wholly beneficial. Even if there are times when Stephens overstresses the guilt and fear that haunts our post-Christian land, I relished every second of Lesley Sharp's performance… Stephens' picture of an England in which everyone furtively harbours dark secrets is only partly credible. But he has written a stunning star part that allows Sharp to display her abundant emotional range: she can be mocking, compassionate, tough or tender as occasion demands. Towards her mother, excellently played by Susan Brown, she is all cold-eyed anger; towards her deeply damaged husband, she displays an exasperated love… Marianne Elliott's sensitive production is strikingly designed by Hildegard Bechtler to suggest that, like the play itself, England is a series of dovetailing boxes, filled with an echoing solitude.”
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph – “One normally has a pretty good idea about a show's quality and general direction by the time the interval arrives. But Simon Stephens' new drama keeps springing surprises… The drama becomes an acutely perceptive and compassionate study of a brave and likeable woman trying to make sense of her life after it has been blighted by several different kinds of crisis. There is an unsentimental compassion in the writing, and a tough refusal to surrender to depression and despair, that I found genuinely uplifting… At its searching best, this play is about the possibility of spiritual redemption, but it is too savvy, sharp and witty to seem preachy or didactic… The show isn't helped by ugly, cumbersome designs by Hildegard Bechtler, but Marianne Elliott directs with passion and precision, while Lesley Sharp gives a performance that deserves awards in the title role… Among the supporting cast, Brian Capron as a kindly pick-up, Susan Brown as Harper's formidable mother, and Nitin Kundra, in a comic cameo of exceptional grace and humour, shine particularly brightly.”
Ian Shuttleworth in the Financial Times - “Have you ever found yourself, in the middle of a crowd, wonderstruck by the notion of such a vast number of full, complex and independent lives – of separate universes, in effect, as far as those at their respective centres are concerned? This, I think, is something akin to the driving preoccupation of Simon Stephens’ playwriting… Lesley Sharp’s delivery of her lines is unchangingly affectless and a little stilted, as well as devoid of any Mancunian accent. In the course of the second half, we begin to realise that she is both dominated by and armoured against her own central issue, the reason her family moved south – her husband’s conviction for a sex offence – and see her family’s first faltering steps towards dealing with their own continuing individual and collective relationships… Although it feels to me somewhat over-familiar in terms of Stephens’ output, I am always gratified to experience this kind of trust in an audience’s ability and willingness to look beneath an apparently unexceptional surface.”
Is living in Uxbridge such bad news? The titular heroine of Simon Stephens’s compelling new play Harper Regan in the Cottesloe, prompting a magnificent performance from Lesley Sharp, is a character in crisis, out on the edge, poised in flight from her job, her husband and her daughter.
As in his last play, Motortown, which charted an episodic period of non-adjustment in the return to Britain of a serving soldier, Stephens writes the geography of a soul in torment, a spiritual odyssey as well as a physical one. Harper needs to go home to Stockport to visit her dying father. But she also needs to leave Uxbridge, the anonymity of her adopted home near the airport with views across the country towards Oxford.
The play is devised as a series of collisions through which Harper can learn to breathe a new life of self appreciation. The disturbing secret of her marriage may or may not have contributed to this process. A piece of falling masonry has narrowly missed its target, but the outer accidents of the real world signify only the necessity of coping with inner turmoil.
This quality of fateful, mysterious ambiguity and anxiety is superbly conveyed by Lesley Sharp, who has the rare knack of making you feel exactly what the character is thinking without spelling it out. She endures the trite waffle of her employer (Michael Mears) in a haulage company while dreaming of a world elsewhere.
On the banks of the Grand Union canal she encounters a beautiful young boy (Troy Glasgow). In a pub at eleven in the morning, an uncouth journalist (Jack Deam) praises her “attractive shoulders” and launches into an anti-Semitic rant before she takes decisive action: an act of violence is committed and she absconds with a leather jacket as a sort of token.
Scenes of domestic responsibility at the hospice where her father is dying and in her mother’s (Susan Brown) house which she has not visited for two years jostle against her sexual escapade with a married man (Brian Capron) in a posh Manchester hotel. Her father was a teacher. Her parents are separated. She walked out of her house and has just kept walking.
Marianne Elliott’s production, eerily designed by Hildegard Bechtler as a series of interlocking locations in an impersonal landscape, reaches a moment on transfiguration at a future point in Harper’s story, but there is no real resolution. You realise, in fact, that the play has been a story of expiation, and that Harper has gone through the mill just as much of telling what happened as of allowing those events to overtake her. And the sad, slow hum of Lesley Sharp’s performance is the best explanation of all.
I'd rather watch Emmerdale and I hate Emmerdale. I'm just thankful that I payed £5 for a standing ticket.
This was utter rubbish....the writing was poor and the director needs to be sacked.
Thanks for wasting 3 hours of my life.
Don't see it. - Barry George
07 Aug 08
Excellent performances in a thought provoking play - who holds the power in the relationship between parent and child - does it mattter how many times we say "i Love you". Lesley Sharpe is astonishing and mesmeric. Worth a second view. - Ed
11 Jul 08
Excellent performances in a thought provoking play - who holds the power in the relationship between parent and child - does it mattter how many times we say "i Love you". Lesley Sharpe is astonishing and mesmeric. Worth a second view. - Ed
11 Jul 08
Oops - problems posting; should have been one-star and only got that because of the marginally less terrible scene with Harper's mother (Susan Brown). - David Baxter
10 Jul 08
Quite astonishingly awful and by far the worst thing I have ever seen at the National. Clearly in thrall to Pinter, Simon Stephens presents us with repellant character, a series of turgid and implausible scenes complete with completely unrealistic dialogue. If I thought about it a bit more perhaps it would make some sense or deliver a profound message but I really cannot be bothered. A complete waste of time and it has shaken my previous belief that Marianne Elliott can do no wrong. - David Baxter
10 Jul 08
The thinking playgoers night out. Disturbingly,dramatically stirring you to rethink your vslues truthfully, and be grateful for the good things available for your control if you can stay sane in this corrupt crazy deteriorating world. Brilliant witty perceptive writing,expert direction and acting,symbolic setchanges,sensitive lighting and sound. Compelling theatre. - ALEX GREEN
01 Jun 08
It’s a great idea and I have nothing but admiration for the writing, the staging and the performances of this piece. My problem with it is the implausibility of a couple of Harper’s encounters and the pace and length of the piece, which results in more being less. It could have been a lot better. - Gareth James
16 May 08
This isn't an easy play but it has a cumulative effect which is very rewarding. There are fantastic performances, Lesley Sharpe is wonderful and Nick Sidi is absolutely brilliant. Very moving. Just don't sit on the front row or you'll get a very sore neck... - Scal
06 May 08
oops, I pressed the wrong button -- I meant to give 5 stars. - LDE
02 May 08
I couldn't disagree more with those reviewers who thought the play was tosh. We went last night, and came out moved and thoughtful and keen to see it again. Sometimes when you've seen a really good play, it's hard to get it out of your mind the next day, and this is very much the case with Harper Regan.
This bittersweet domestic drama documents what happens when the eponymous heroine Harper 'runs away' from her life, ostensibly to visit her dying father though it soon becomes apparent that her crisis involves much more than just that.
The 'journey' she takes is in turns moving, shocking and revelatory. The confrontational scenes -- in particular the one with her mother -- are harrowing and finely wrought.
The second half of the play is even more moving than the first, revealing the secret of her husband's 'misdemeanours' without judging. Harper attempts to reconcile reality, and human frailty, with her strong desire to keep her family together.
The production itself was excellent, with the great Marianne Elliott's direction up to its usual high standards. Lesley Sharp as Harper was absolutely superb, conveying all the confusion, fury, love and humour of the character. Another standout was Jessica Raine as the spiky but lovable daughter Sarah; it's amazing to read in the programme that she hasn't even finished her studies at RADA. I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of her in the future.
In the hotel, with the unexpectedly kindly James, Harper says "I'm not really very in my body"; I think we all feel like that from time to time.
I can see that this is not a play for everybody, and does not perhaps have a universal appeal. But it did it for me.
- LDE
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