And A Nightingale Sang Reviews
February 11th, 2010
And A Nightingale Sang: 11 March – 3 April 2010
And A Nightingale Sang in currently entertaining audiences at the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme before it moves to Oldham Coliseum Theatre on 11 March 2010.
Take a look at what the critics think so far:
CP Taylor’s gentle, nostalgic saga of life on the domestic front evokes a world of make do and mend, casualties in foreign climes and the sound of Dame Vera Lynn, which seems as long ago as … last September, actually; the recent return of Dame Vera to the top of the charts makes this a canny time to revive a play filled with many of her best-loved songs.
Not that Taylor’s drama belongs to the world of cash-in musicals. It began life in the 1970s as an oral-history project commissioned by Newcastle’s Live Theatre, and the music forms a natural part of the fabric of life in the days when families made their own entertainment.
Head of the household George (Simeon Truby) keeps rushing in with the latest piece of sheet music, though with a family like his you can’t blame him for trying to drown out the noise. Taylor had a poet’s ear for the cadences of his adopted north-east, and each scene is a clamour of competing voices. Devout mother Peggy (Katherine Dow Blyton) makes shrill supplications to Our Lady; daughter Joyce (Anna Doolan) frets whether her husband’s leave date tallies with the arrival of her child; while Grandpa Andie (Ged McKenna) staggers round with a noisome sack containing the remains of his beloved whippet.
Sarah Punshon’s production has a hearty atmosphere and is well grounded in the observations of Laura Norton, as the narrator and elder sister Helen, who keeps her composure while all others lose theirs. And the accents are so convincing you have to remind yourself that, though this is Newcastle-under-Lyme, you’ve come to the right address.
The Guardian
Great plays weren’t the thing with Cecil Taylor, the Glasgow-born writer who spent most of his life around Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His best play by mainstream standards was his last, Good, about a decent German’s slow immersion in Nazism, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Mostly, Taylor wrote highly effective dramas that spoke to people locally in a language and method they could take to. That language isn’t only a matter of local meanings (“wife” we soon understand in old soldier Andie’s mouth means ‘woman’, though doubtless most of the ‘wife’s were wives too) but a matter of cultural expectations.
Nightingale follows the Tyneside Stott family from 1939 to 1945, as they hardly let the War interrupt their concerns. After initially diving for protection against bombs, before realising the apparent air-raid siren is a whistling kettle, they stick to what really bothers them.
For dolled-up Joyce it’s making-up her mind and dealing with a loveless marriage. For mother Peggy it’s the demands of a life based on stern Catholicism. Which creates difficulties for husband George when, on a tide of wartime confidence, he joins the communists. ‘Old soldier’ Andie sees wartime vicissitudes in terms of a spare room for him and his extensive luggage.
Wartime ballads, including the title one, stand for these folks’ mix of sentiment and resilience, appearing throughout thanks to George’s pianism. Singing and playing alike are strong, especially Laura Norton’s Helen, the narrator who crosses time and space, introducing her family and telling her own story of wartime romance as she emerges from the resignation with which the character waits for chronological middle-age to catch up with her lack of self-confidence, via lipstick and make-up to the confidence in which she can take the revelations of reality that bind her lover.
Fine young director Sarah Punshon makes each point clearly on Helen Goddard’s spare set, silvery barrage-balloons hanging above the family table (fulcrum for major arguments) and flagstone floor. She can’t turn this assemblage of wartime incidents into great drama, but she ensures it speaks with resolution and humour of the people, to the people, loud and clear.
Reviews Gate
All too often, family dramas set in wartime Britain overdo the tragedy or the never say die Blitz spirit, or both. How refreshing, then, to have a reworking of CP Taylor’s bittersweet story of family life on Tyneside during the Second World War that is free of overt sentimentality.
Under the careful direction of Sarah Punshon, the family members at the centre of this play are allowed to tell their collective and individual stories in a down to earth and often hilarious way. They suffer uncertainty and hardships while trying to get on with their lives. And yet, amid the laughter, the painfulness of war still ebbs through in every line.
The New Vic has joined forces with the Oldham Coliseum for this production and it is clearly a successful marriage. Laura Norton has the immense job of not only playing the part of crippled daughter Helen but simultaneously narrating – a task in which she succeeds admirably.
The rest of the cast is well up to the mark, too. Katherine Dow Blyton makes a fine god-fearing matriarch Peggy, opposite Simeon Truby as her piano-playing husband George, while Ged McKenna generates most of the laughs as mischievous grandad Andie.
As an added bonus, the cast perform some of the best-loved songs of the period, including The White Cliffs of Dover and, as you might expect, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. All in all, an honest-to-goodness musical play that tells an engaging story in a most satisfying manner.
The Stage
