QUENTIN LETTS: Shining ladies light up our newest stage

These Shining Lives (Park Theatre)

Verdict: : London's newest theatre opens

Rating:

Enlarge   Vivacious: Honeysuckle Weeks (top) and Nathalie Carrington in These Shining Lives

Two shows this week had a suppression-of-medical-warning theme. These Shining Lives is the opening show at London’s newest theatre, the Park (next to Finsbury Park Tube).

It’s an airy, boxy place, built with £2.5 million of private money. And it has a theatre dog! She’s a Great Dane-Mastiff cross  and lopes around the place, behaving beautifully.

Melanie Marnich’s play tells of a scandal in Twenties Illinois when women at a wristwatch factory were poisoned by radium. It was in the luminous paint they applied to watch dials.

The women lick their paintbrushes to improve the accuracy of their work. The foreman assures them this is safe. Radium is ‘more than OK for you — it’s medicinal’. When they all get cancer, the company doctor tells them to take aspirin.

The women run short of the one thing they supposedly manufactured: time.

There are few surprises in this formulaic tearjerker, but it is well acted by four women (Charity Wakefield, Honeysuckle Weeks, Nathalie Carrington and Melanie Bond) and two chaps (Alec  Newman and David Calvitto).

The Park’s main space has the layout and roughly the size of the Donmar Warehouse, with some of the controlled ambience of  Coventry’s Belgrade. The soundproofing needs some work and the lighting in Loveday Ingram’s production needs to be tighter, but North London is lucky to have such a venue. 

Public Enemy (Young Vic)

Verdict: Ibsen updated

Rating:

At the Young Vic, Ibsen’s great Public Enemy is being given an outing in a pared-down, confrontational version by David Harrower.

An earnest doctor, Stockmann, finds that his home town’s new spa is polluted by bacteria. He presumes he will be thanked for making this life-saving discovery. Instead, he is silenced by the media and politicians and has his career ruined.

Richard Jones’s production whizzes along. It begins in Stockmann’s pine-walled house, complete with Seventies Scandinavian furniture and a stylised view of a sparkling fjord.

Add some mouth organ, strains of accordion music, a pretty girl in a Nordic sweater and a wall cartoon of Mickey Mouse holding a Soviet Union flag. I liked all this quirkiness. 

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A scene in which Stockmann addresses the village is gripping. It is done here as a political address, direct to the audience. Nick Fletcher’s Jesus-bearded, long-haired Stockmann — really well done, Messianic yet conversational — forces us to wonder if today’s dreadful lying politicians are our own fault.

Update: Nick Fletcher and Niall Ashdown in Public Enemy at the Young Vic

Stockmann’s brother is the Mayor — a good, shifty turn by Darrell D’Silva, in light-sensitive glasses, bad hairdo and a dodgy blue uniform.

He leans on the Left-wing newspaper editor (Bryan Dick) who initially says he will publish Stockmann’s findings but goes cold when he contemplates the damage it will do to the local economy. What lovely satire freights the line: ‘We’re a liberal newspaper, we encourage all kinds of opinions.’ Best laugh of the night.

I kept wondering what Ibsen would have made of Andrew Wakefield, the MMR doctor driven out of our society by the medical and political Establishments and parts of the media. Such a compressed version of this play may lose the slow build-up and, therefore, a certain measure of dramatic tension, but the political contradictions of censorship for the ‘public good’ (I nearly wrote ‘herd immunity’) are sharply drawn and thoroughly watchable.

Ibsen has rarely felt so liberated.