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The Well
Published on Friday, 17 May 2013
3

Promotional Image

3 stars

Hove Town Hall (3Phase) (venue website)
Theatre
10 May, 9:00pm-11:00pm; 11 May, 7:00pm-9:00pm; 12 May, 3:00pm-5:00pm; 15-17, 22-24 May, 8:30pm-10:30pm
Reviewed by Darren Taffinder

 Warning: Contains strong language.
 Warning: Contains strong language.
 Warning: Contains strong language.
 Warning: Contains strong language.
 Warning: Contains strong language.
 Warning: Contains strong language.
 Warning: Contains strong language.
 Warning: Contains strong language.
 Warning: Contains strong language.
 Warning: Contains strong language.
 Warning: Contains strong language.

My friend developed a headache and left during the intermission and, unless he moved to a different part of the theatre, the guy sitting in front of me also didn’t come back. This doesn’t sound like the most promising start to a review – but there’s a lot to like about this show. The acting is top-notch, and it’s a fascinating local story; the staging is highly innovative, with the seven actors constantly switching between different characters. The problem is, watching it is like reading a very thick book, with really small writing.

This isn’t a play you can sit back and experience. You have to concentrate extra hard throughout – or as the programme puts it, “you’ll have to be on the ball”. Your mind is continuinally trying to keep up as the actors swap between characters and locations, and at the end I felt a little bit bludgeoned.

The Well is the final part of a loose trilogy of shows including The Silent Stream, about the Prince Regent George IV, and Betsy: Wisdom Of A Brighton Whore. I haven’t seen The Silent Stream, but I saw Betsy last week. It’s a very straightforward one-woman show about the mum of The Well’s main character, Jack. Things do not end well for Betsy and her four year-old son, and when we next pick up with Jack, he’s a young man working on the Woodingdean Well – the deepest hand-dug well in the world, as deep as the Empire State Building is as tall.

You don’t have to see either show before watching The Well, and in fact it might be better to go in blind. The Well is much more ambitious and stylised than Betsy; it’s as though George Lucas gave Ingmar Bergman the chance to direct Return of The Jedi (and told him to do it in black & white). What the show really needed was a bit of lightness, some humour, a few moments of quiet. As it is, it’s heavy going, almost monotone at times, and occasionally I felt like I was being shouted at. Shouted at a little too much.

But the play did have a wonderful atmosphere. I really enjoyed the musical parts when the cast would join together and sing. They were able to create a sense of claustrophobia, and what it must have been like to work down within the well, through quite a simple set centred around some scaffolding.

For such a complex play, though, the politics are a touch simplistic – working man good, politicians and church bad. I didn’t know the Victorian Church of England was so much like the Westboro Baptists (“Devil worship!”). For a story that fits into a larger narrative, some elements are also left dangling at the end, and not in an intriguing ambiguous way. I wanted a final coda or just something to round it off.

This is an ambitious, challenging play that requires your focus, and writer and director Jonathan Brown cannot be faulted for his epic vision. So often we talk about theatre talking down to its audience. This is not something that could be said about this show. Just remember to bring the paracetamol.

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