Cracked Pot/Oedipus (tour)
If someone ever creates an arts version of Mount Rushmore, they should carve it into the Pennines and chisel Barrie Rutter‘s imposing features in the foreground. With bulging eyes swivelling like globes, and the bark of a cultured Yorkshire terrier, the Northern Broadsides main man creates as imposing a presence as you’ll see on any stage anywhere.
The current Broadsides tour features two works by Blake Morrison, and continues the company’s penchant for grafting northern vowels onto classic texts. The Cracked Pot is actually Morrison’s reworking of an old German play, and unusually for the company it portrays a specific time and place. Skipton, north Yorkshire, circa 1810 in fact.
Rutter (pictured), scarred and shaven-headed, plays the lovingly corrupt Judge Adam, whose unruly court has come to the attention of higher authorities. Judge Walter (John Branwell on top form) is approaching from Manchester, throwing a dishevelled Adam into panic and calling for ale. Needless to say, Adam is aware that his court won’t bear close scrutiny, a fact underlined when a seemingly trivial domestic dispute is brought before him.
However, the squabble over a broken jug soon points to darker deeds afoot, with the truculent, toadying Adam gradually realising the game is up. The text is fleshy and ribald, with a ‘bletherhead’ here and a ‘splundered’ there, plus an energy in Rutter’s performance that leaves you floored. Never mind physical theatre, this is theatrical fisticuffs at dawn with Morrison’s thumping script for cudgels. A bruising, and gleeful, tour-de-force.
One of the pleasures of a Broadsides double-bill is seeing actors, who a few hours earlier played the jester, suddenly portraying noble rustics in similar garb. Morrison’s Oedipus isn’t complex, but played through in one ninety-minute act it invokes more of the legend than any dusty tome. The pulse of stamps and stones at the outset matches the rhythm in dialogue that Rutter demands as a director. He himself offers only a stunning cameo as the blind seer Tiresias, baiting Conrad Nelson as the ill-fated Oedipus.
Nelson’s portrayal (slacks and sandals) gives us the human grit behind the psychobabble, with Sarah Parks‘ Jocasta hinting darkly at Lady Macbeth-style manipulations. Devoid of props, the cast’s precision is often startling as they bring news of an invading plague which grimly compares with foot-and-mouth mania. ‘Farmers wi’ nowt to farm… where’s the man that can save us from this mess?’ the public protest.
Equally eternal ‘values’ are played out amid the conspiracy of titled families and state manoeuvres. ‘Power without responsibility – who can beat it?’ rasps Branwell as Creon. A wretched pawn adrift, and bereft of godly alliance, Oedipus is left to ponder the ultimate anguish. You can put out the eyes with knives, but you can’t murder the memories lodged behind them.
Not the last toppled leader doomed to wander in the wilderness, he staggers off blindly in close imitation of the mocked Tiresias. ‘Gracious, I’m shattered,’ gasps the woman next to me at the close. Yes, they make their audiences work hard these Broadsides, but by God they’re worth going the distance with.
Gareth Thompson (reviewed at Halifax Dean Clough Viaduct)
