4
Apr
2011

Louis de Bernières’ Earlsfield on Stage

‘Tweet effin’ tweet,’ go the sparrows, as Antique Annie laments the decline in values: ‘There wasn’t any violence during the war.’ Meanwhile the dead are griping in their graves – ‘Someone’s talking foreign’ – about their neighbours in the Huguenot cemetery, Maria the Greek is screaming, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ from her top-floor window, and two blue plastic bags are wafting to Tooting Bec.

Just a regular Sunday morning in Earlsfield, South London – as recreated by Louis de Bernières, who lived there for ten years while writing his South American trilogy and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Like Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, from which de Bernières took his inspiration, Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World is ‘A Play for Voices’. The BBC broadcast it as a radio play in 1998.

Bad Physics, in association with London Theatre Academy, have transformed it into a play for all the senses. You can choose to be led into the auditorium blindfold and stay sightless throughout, in which case when Ethel, ‘prime surveyor of news and views’, limps in, you’ll hear her practical shoes and smell her lavender rinse, but you won’t see her pink-rimmed specs or the cigarette dangling from her lips as she hunches towards you – ‘’Ello, darlin’’ – to share some gossip.

If you go without a blindfold or can’t resist taking a peek, you’ll discover how the smells of Mrs Rajiv’s pharmacy and Mrs Wong’s chippie are created, why there is always a chill breeze when the dead speak, and how many sounds can be simulated with a pint-size plastic cup.

The narrator (Christopher Hammond) is our invaluable guide through this colourful suburb. He does a majestic job of making an often intricate text clearly audible in an echoey space. In writing the narrator’s part, de Bernières seems to have been torn between giving him contemporary prose to recite and attempting something closer to the poetry of Under Milk Wood. In the resulting halfway house some of it sounds a bit pastiche: ‘downwinding the glass’ instead of ‘winding the window down’, ‘pre-prandial rhymester-laureates of the roundabouts and swings’ to describe some schoolgirls.

But the slang is spot-on, each character is instantly vivid, and this daring production genuinely makes you feel part of a community. When the most horrible cat in Ramillies Road ambushed a gullible outsider, and Thrombotic Bert yelled, ‘Martha’s bagged another one!’ I felt like celebrating with him.

Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World is running until April 16 at:

Southwark Playhouse
Shipwright Yard
Southwark
SE1 2TF

Tel: 020 7407 0234

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