Roseacre, HOME; January 15-17
I find myself in HOME: Manchester’s newest theatre-cinema-eatery, the bolder and brasher stepchild of that cultural staple, the Cornerhouse. I am sitting on the kind of chairs you find arranged in a school hall before the latest iteration of the Nativity (and it’s a full house, to the extent that we get off to a late start as a whole new row of chairs are brought in at the front) – and, does it feel amateur, does the word amateur snake briefly across my mind, so fast it’s there and gone before I can repress it? Yes. Yes it does. But never mind that for now: I am here to see Roseacre, the third production by fledgling theatre company Square Peg, their stab at a Nordic thriller.
Whether you’re familiar with the connotations of the title (in the real world, there is an ongoing battle to prevent fracking in Roseacre Wood that has been blocked by Lancashire County Council), it is certainly evocative, recalling not so much Nordic drama as it does an episode of Broadchurch. Four actors take to the small stage as an Editors track begins, and we watch two men and two women caught in snapshots, each moving about the other in a way that I can imagine people who don’t go to the theatre a lot might say is theatrical, pejoratively. It’s all a little self-conscious.
It feels as if five uncomfortable minutes pass before the play proper begins. We find ourselves at a crime scene. A policeman and a forensic sort discuss a body that has just been found. A protest is referred to. Did the police over-react? Never mind that: a young woman is opening a florist? – talking on the phone to – her colleague? A girlfriend? Too soon to say. A new policeman has arrived in the area. Turns out he only got the job because his dad plays golf with the high-ups. Another policeman, a local, talks cars with him. The local policeman is a bit of a bruiser: he keeps trying to get in touch with someone – turns out this someone was the colleague – girlfriend? – we heard on the phone earlier.
The plot begins to become clearer: the dead man is the florist’s husband (they were in the middle of a divorce), and the florist has been having an affair with her colleague (her girlfriend). It turns out her girlfriend is a member of the police (or is she?) placed on the scene by that local policeman we saw before – and asked to infiltrate an activist group and report back. But she only went and fell in love with the florist didn’t she? She only went and formed a life for herself, started dreaming big, starting wanting something normal. And that local copper – we know he’s a bad un, we know he’s a bit shady when we see him keeping things from that new copper, who’s had a knob scratched into the paintwork of his car.
So what can we say about Roseacre? This might seem like a strange detail to pick up on first, but the sound is impeccable. Owen Rafferty does a tremendous job, picking out everything from a snapped twig to a closed car door at precisely the right moment. Sound is used really well throughout and it lifts the play during the longueurs, which we’ll get to in a moment. Music, on the other hand, is over-used. Judging when, where and what to use is tricky: you can be a Scorsese, and dazzle, or you can be a Hollyoaks, and drizzle – Roseacre often drizzles. The use of sound however, underlines the fact that there are portions of the play that really work and could be re-edited into a tight and effective 30-minute radio play. But Roseacre is 90 minutes.
The four members of the cast mostly do their best: Emma Romy-Jones plays the florist-widow-murder suspect, Alice Hulme, and she brings a consistency and lightness to the role that make her moments in the spotlight among the best in the play. She moves well on stage, inhabits the role in a plausible way, and doesn’t intrude when it’s time for the focus to rest elsewhere. If the Royal Exchange (at the very least) don’t snap her up for something soon, they’ll be missing out. The local policeman played by Dominic Myerscough, is a tough, unsympathetic role (the kind of policeman that Jo Nesbo writes) – particularly as the narrative strains to hold everything together, but his turn as the older Scottish policeman demonstrates he has some chops. Alice’s undercover girlfriend and the new policeman on the block are played by Katie Robinson and Michael White respectively. As I watched the play, I couldn’t help but feel that of all the actors, these two moved with the most formality, particularly when it came to moving props on and off the stage – with chairs placed or removed as if it was a dinner party and not a piece of theatre. Their movements were self-conscious at times and somewhat distracting too, as if they were trying too hard to efface themselves (which might be the case given they are responsible for Square Peg). The transitions and the moments where we glimpse characters in vignette are the most obvious examples of what gets called physical theatre, but they have a tendency to feel amateur and provincial. When Katie plays the character of Viv (the undercover girlfriend) she can be a bit soapy, expressing too much with her face and occasionally over-acting – but a small cameo as a prostitute (in fact a whole scene involving her and Myerscough) is probably the best thing in the play, and one of two moments when Roseacre really works as a piece of theatre (the other: when two characters are moving through a forest, and each of the actors switch and turn as trees, the audience glimpsing a potential killer and a potential murder victim, chasing and evading). Michael White’s turn as the new policeman is actually subtle enough and low key enough to give the others room…
But the biggest problem with the play is the writing, which lies at Michael White’s door also. Roseacre isn’t written well. It would take the same amount of words again to explain precisely why (and the play could do with a line by line interrogation of what the various issues are) but the main problem in Roseacre is that plot determines character, as it does in soap, rather than the other way around. There are lines and scenes and moments that test the audience’s patience (especially sat on school hall chairs), and there was a certain amount of fidgeting in the room pretty much throughout. But there were also moments where lines managed to land a few laughs. So there’s potential here. And you know, maybe ITV will have a slot at some point in the future for a reworking of this (because actually both fracking and undercover police wrecking lives are hot topics, demonstrating that Square Peg have at least read the news and have a bit of nous). But right now, if asked to gauge whether Roseacre is a success or not, I’d have to say: not quite.
Peter Wild