Thank you to all
Morning Star says “the acting is outstanding, as is the imaginative use of Corinne Hockley and Davy McGuire’s brilliant installations.”
Borne by ships’ rats and their parasitic fleas, it usually spelled a horrifying, lingering death and a plague pit for a grave.
Naomi Wallace’s play hones in on the hysteria of the time and combines it with a powerful study of the class struggle between master and servant and their mutual fear and loathing.
Add repressed sexuality to the mix and you have a seething stew of torrid emotions.
The plot revolves around an upper-class merchant William Snelgrave (Dan Maxwell) and his wife Darcy (Kate Abraham) who are coming to the end of their 28-day quarantine when a sailor and an all-knowing young girl (Victoria Bavister) burst into their home.
This disaster is spotted by gloating plague guard Kabe (Chris Donnelly) who, prowling around like a wolf eying his caged prey, slaps another month’s confinement on the household.
Bunce the sailor (Ian Gain) is a salt-of-the-earth sea dog who is at the opposite end of the social spectrum to the arrogant authoritarian Snelgrave.
But role reversal is crudely signposted when the merchant suggests he wear his fine gentleman’s shoes and sure enough by the play’s end he is sporting the full silk-and-lace monty.
The wife is also possessed by Bunce in a scene of fraught fumbling and groping in which echoes of Joe Losey’s the Servant or even Jean Genet’s The Maids abound.
Also lurking in the inspirational alleyways is Aids – and the LA riots get a look in too.
Wallace has been called a Marxist playwright and while she is certainly political, the intensity of the piece could have been leavened by a little more humour.
But the acting is outstanding, as is the imaginative use of Corinne Hockley and Davy McGuire’s brilliant installations.
Michael Stewart
“This revival is a show of quality and depth, fascinating and repellant in picking over the sores of one of London’s darkest hours.”
Imagine ’28 Days Later’ mashed up with ‘Blackadder II’ and you’re somewhere near grasping Naomi Wallace’s award-laden 1996 study in claustrophobia.
The Snellgraves (Dan Maxwell and Kate Abraham) are only hours away from ending their plague quarantine when they find themselves invaded by the unlikely pairing of earthy seaman Bunce (Iain Gain) and twelve year-old orphan Morse (Victoria Bavister). Rumbled by lascivious watchman Kabe (Chris Donnelly) – their only contact with the outside – their well-appointed house must become an enforced sickbay for another month – and possibly their tomb.
Wallace’s text never drops a gear below intense and is well-served by a director and ensemble at the peak of their powers. Gain, Maxwell and Abraham adeptly make up a highly-watchable love triangle, touching and brutal by turns, and if their power games edge towards predictability by the end, it is more than compensated for by Bavister’s excellent Morse, who dances beguilingly on a knife-edge between feral cunning and juvenile helplessness. Donnelly quite simply has a blast as their unofficial jailer – as comic and grotesque as you’d expect for someone who stares into Hell every day. Sue Colverd directs with an assured touch and gets the very best from her cast. A word should also go to the splendid costumes by Corinne Hockley and elegant visuals by Davy Mc Guire, even if the latter do feel under-used.
This revival is a show of quality and depth, fascinating and repellant in picking over the sores of one of London’s darkest hours.
Dominic di Nezza
The production is ably assisted by some fine acting performances, notably Ian Gain whose portrayal of Bunce bubbles with dark intensity.
SET against a backdrop of plague-ridden London in 1665, Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare tells the story of complex relationships driven to breaking point by crisis.
The wealthy Snelgraves are preparing to leave London after an enforced period of quarantine when two strangers enter their home, leading to a further 28 days isolation.
The strangers – grizzled northern sailor Bunce and the waif-like and mysterious Morse – come from the other end of the social spectrum to the Snelgraves and the class divide is writ large by pompous 17th century attitudes.
The plague, however, is a great leveller and the Snelgraves find themselves in a world with little regard for their wealth. Imprisoned by the lecherous and revolutionary Kabe and with their conservative values challenged by Bunce and Morse, the couple struggle to come to terms with their fear and desire.
The confined set of the Old Red Lion always poses a challenge, but the space is used well and conveys well the claustrophobia inherent in the story. The production is ably assisted by some fine acting performances, notably Ian Gain whose portrayal of Bunce bubbles with dark intensity.
Although smattered with dark humour, One Flea Spare is a fairly cheerless portrayal of a corrupt and fetid London, but is nevertheless a powerful and enjoyable experience.
Jon Dean
Tottenham & Wood Green Journal
Naomi Wallace talks to Martin Edwards.
NAOMI Wallace has a guilty pleasure.
“I have a shameful obsession with tennis,” she admits. “I love to see Wimbledon. I promise myself that if I get a certain play done I allow myself to watch it.”
Despite the “elitism of the sport in terms of the people who play”, she is nonetheless a big fan of Rafael Nadel and even finds herself “warming to Andy Murray.”
Just like the late Harold Pinter’s love of cricket, the American playwright insists that tennis has all the drama of a great play. “It’s the most intense theatre that exists…the dialogue with the ball.”
When she’s not hypnotised with the dialogue on the tennis court, Wallace is busy creating her own.
A new play, ‘And I And Silence’, opens in May in London, as part of a three-month season of work by women playwrights. The play explores the friendship between two troubled teenagers amidst the brutal reality of adulthood during 1950s segregated America.
Meanwhile, a revival of her 1996 play, ‘One Flea Spare’ is currently playing about five miles away at the Old Red Lion in Islington, north London. The tale centres on the relationships and struggles for power between a wealthy couple and a sailor and young girl kept in quarantine for 28 days during 17th century plague-ravaged London.
Born in Prospect, Kentucky, Wallace divides her time between her birthplace and the Yorkshire Dales, where she lives with her partner Bruce MacLeod and her three children.
So, are there differences in the way her work is received in both countries?
“At this moment my work seems to be having a warmer reception in this country, and in Europe, as compared to the US,” Wallace says. “Perhaps because in the UK there seems to be a stronger, longer tradition of political theatre.”
Wallace makes the personal, political and is keen to pull apart social constructions of gender, class, or other notions of identity.
“I’m interested in relationships of power,” she says. “How the struggle for power and/or agency – or indeed withholding of that power – affects us in the most intimate ways. I’m interested in investigating how social and historical forces come to bare on who we think we are and what we need…”
While critics in New York often condemn her work (The New York Times once called her a “Marxist dinosaur”) her writing has garnered greater appeal in other parts of the world.
One Flea Spare was incorporated into the permanent repertoire of the French National Theater, La Comedie-Francaise, making Wallace one of only two American playwrights ever to have been added to the repertoire in 300 years – the other was Tennessee Williams.
And she has also attracted interest in the Middle East, having recently returned from Palestine, where she has long campaigned for the justice and human rights of Palestinians.
“I met a wonderful Palestinian artistic director who is interested in One Flea Spare. And so what interests me is their connection to my play.”
She adds: “A theatre will find its own articulation through the play it has chosen to produce. In this way, fresh meaning and relevancies are created to serve their artistic communities.”
A frequent observation of Wallace’s work focuses on her lyrical use of language and to watch her plays often feels like listening to an epic poem, her characters creating a world of beautiful and terrifying imagery.
However, while her first forays into writing began with poetry, Wallace is less keen on the label as a way of describing her plays.
“When I hear a play described as ‘poetical’ I feel like running in the opposite direction,” she says. “I don’t think I have ever consciously tried to write in a lyrical fashion. How I write is in some sense how I hear the world, or perhaps I should say how the world has been told to me.”
With two of her plays on in London over the next few months, many of us now have the chance to step into this strange and wonderful world from one of the world’s most lauded playwrights.
*’One Flea Spare’ is showing at the Old Red Lion in Islington, north London, until 16 April. ‘And I And Silence’ will be at the Finborough Theatre, Chelsea, west London, from 10 May to 4 June.
“You will walk out shocked and rattled, but it is worth every moment. This play is superb.”
THE many fingers of this play slip into your chest cavity and squeeze your heart hard. In the claustrophobic confines of the Old Red Lion theatre, you find yourself sitting inside the prison of a 17th century house, condemned to quarantine for 28 days as the plague ravishes all outside.
Your co-confined are an unlikely bunch and the days tie them together, forcing them to peel back their social conditioning.
Mr and Mrs Snelgrave are rich and repressed. Morse is “old inside”, a 12-year-old with a vivid imagination. Bunce is a poor sailor with a life as tough as the 17th century could dish out.
Through a continuous lyrical swirl of text, the prisoners’ voices intertwine as they enter a delirious awakening of their most basic selves, each piercing the other in different forms. Class, compassion, power and prejudice are stripped naked in the face of impending death.
The performances are searing and raw – expected from an experienced cast, including the likes of Coronation Street’s Ian Gain. Sue Colverd directs vitality into the play, but it is surely the great playwright, political writer and poet Naomi Wallace’s voice that gives it its punch.
Fifteen years since it was last staged, the play doesn’t fail to resonate.
In fact, Wallace describes Red Dog Theatre Company’s production of her play as “one of the best – gritty, sensual, inventive and intense”.
It is indeed all of the above, and as you are swept up in its hysterical crescendo you can’t help but feel glad to be living in this time.
You will walk out shocked and rattled, but it is worth every moment. This play is superb.
Karina Whallley
“It’s rich and dense, but never less than compelling in a revival that boasts some fine performances” ****4 stars in the Guardian****
The wealthy Snelgraves, shut up in their house in a plague-ravaged London in 1665, have only hours left of a 28-day quarantine when their home is invaded by a sailor, Bunce, and a 12-year-old girl who claims to be the only surviving child of neighbours. With the arrival of the newcomers, the Snelgraves’ quarantine, enforced by the corrupt Kabe, who stalks the streets like death itself, must begin all over again.
It’s rich and dense, but never less than compelling in a revival that boasts some fine performances, particularly from Kate Abrahams, whose grave Mrs Snelgrave seethes with quiet longing. I’m not convinced that the dumb-show-style installation at the beginning really adds much to the proceedings, but this is a tough and transcendent piece of proper grown-up theatre on the Fringe.
Lyn Gardner
“London’s scarred, ribald and fetid past has rarely seemed so infectiously alive.”
The Great Plague, which tore through London in 1665, is revisited with bubo-popping gusto in this zestful revival of Naomi Wallace’s 1995 play.
Wallace sets her stage superbly. ‘The watch’ lock up a rich couple with two passing vagabonds for a 28-day quarantine. Within their plague-haunted prison, love blooms and withers, long-buried animosities rise to the surface and are painfully lanced, and every last exchange is a strategic sally in a class or gender power war.
Sue Colverd’s gutsy, sexy production veritably whiffs of seventeenth-century London, enhanced by the alluringly raggedy, circular design of Corinne Hockley and Davy McGuire’s elegant video art. Ian Gain also delivers a stunningly nuanced, salty, enigmatic performance as Bunce, a runaway sailor, and Kate Abraham’s pursed-lipped, alienated Mrs Snelgrave throbs with secret sadness.
Occasionally, all the dirt and cockney blarney tips over into ‘Blackadder’parody, not helped by a couple of garish performances, and the lurid extremes of Wallace’s script. But London’s scarred, ribald and fetid past has rarely seemed so infectiously alive.
Lucy Powell
“I left the theatre feeling satisfied that I had seen a production which was well acted, well written and well directed.”
Review: One Flea Spare
One Flea Spare was first performed fifteen years ago in London and it’s surprising how relevant the themes still are today. Mr and Mrs Snelgrave have been quarantined in their house during the Great Plague. Nearing their release date, two intruders (Bunce, a rough-around-the-edges sailor and Morse, a young girl orphaned by the disease), break into the house, which means that the quarantined period is extended.
As the audience take their seats they are introduced to an over-sized dress sitting in the middle of the stage. Although it’s a striking imag it was not needed as it wasn’t used again and didn’t add to the piece overall. What worked well was the intimate surroundings, as they added to the claustrophobic themes in this play. The characters are literally trapped in a birdcage structure and the tension is amplified and felt by the audience.
What stands out in this drama is the acting; the standard was exemplarily and each character drew you in to their stories. Victoria Bavister as the young girl plays her unhinged character with such depth that you believe that she is a 12-year-old girl who saw her family die in front of her.
What’s unfortunate about this play is the length: to expect the audience to be engaged with such intense themes for over two-and-a-half hours is quite an ask. The use of period costumes is a fine touch, but the use of a period inaccurate computer chair is a distraction. Also, the sporadic use of projection is not needed; it confuses the style of the piece.
However, the play itself keeps the momentum going with small scenes, and the direction has allowed for slick transitions which keeps the pace smooth. What’s interesting are the parallels you can make with the subject matter and contemporary society. The idea of the intruder invading your space, and how one feels the need to lock oneself away to protect their way of life, is something that we as a nation are experiencing every day.
I left the theatre feeling satisfied that I had seen a production which was well acted, well written and well directed. I also left the theatre feeling drained as there was a lot happening in such a small space for a long time. My advice is: drink some coffee beforehand.
Daniel Kok
“This is possibly the best ensemble of actors I have seen this year”
One Flea Spare
By
Naomi Wallace
Upon entering the auditorium we were confronted by a disembodied dress, trapped in a cage. This striking image made up one component of the brilliant set and costumes designed by Corinne Hockley. The playwright, Naomi Wallace, has crafted a lyrical language that not only speaks to an audience perfectly but when coupled with the A cappella music by Harriet Banks, paints vivid picture in the mind. Wallace’s creation seems to be so relevant to our society today, with the gap between the rich and poor at an all time high, this play challenges the audience to reconsider their perception of the world we live in.
If you have been to the Old Red Lion theatre then you will know the seating is L-shaped and as such this presents a challenge to the director to make every audience member feel like they are being spoken to in the same way. The director, Sue Colverd has managed to achieve this with superb effect. I found myself completely spellbound by the world Colverd and her creative team had made.
The piece had a cast of 5 outstanding actors who comfortably took the comedy and drama elements in their stride. Kate Abraham’s elegant performance was flawless and nearly reduced me to tears at one of the most touching moments I have witnessed in theatre. This is possibly the best ensemble of actors I have seen this year. Take an intimate theatre, a marvelous production and a team of excellent actors and you have One flea Spare.
When I attend the theatre I expect more then just a show, I expect passionate staff and a great experience. If you are like me in this respect then you need to see this show!
To book tickets for another top notch production at the Old Red Lion Theatre click here or call: 02078377816
Written by Thomas Moore for On The Fringe
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- Thank you to all
- Morning Star says “the acting is outstanding, as is the imaginative use of Corinne Hockley and Davy McGuire’s brilliant installations.”
- “This revival is a show of quality and depth, fascinating and repellant in picking over the sores of one of London’s darkest hours.”
- The production is ably assisted by some fine acting performances, notably Ian Gain whose portrayal of Bunce bubbles with dark intensity.
- Naomi Wallace talks to Martin Edwards.