'Oleanna' - the director's best birthday present
Lucy Bailey had two reasons to be excited. First, she is bringing her new production of ‘Oleanna’ to the Cambridge Arts Theatre and secondly, she’d just been working with Salman Rushdie on a reading of his first play – about Helen of Troy. The highly experienced director (everything from a world premiere of a Becket play, opera, Shakespeare and more) has like all theatre makers had a pretty sad time as lock down meant shut down for our precious live stage. It was when things seemed at their darkest though that she got the call. Bath Theatre Royal wanted her to revive David Mamet’s play originally shown in 1992.
‘It came like a beacon of light around last October,’ said Lucy, ‘The news came on my birthday.’ Talking to the director of this typically gritty Mamet drama, it was clear that post Covid 2021 is an ideal time for this revival of a play written in the early 90s but dealing with a universal theme that could not be more apt for our time: sexual harassment inflicted by powerful men on vulnerable young women. In this case the setting is an academic study where a male tutor’s career hangs in the balance after accusations by his female student.
Being Mamet of course, nothing is as simple as it sounds. Bailey is first to admit that the play presents both viewpoints, ‘the man and the woman each believe they are right, each IS right but also wrong.’ She had never read nor seen the play before but when she did so, ‘Oleanna’ immediately spoke to her. The language is visceral, ‘It is extraordinarily brilliant, a true battle of words,’ observes Bailey. ‘The play is tense and combative, increasingly claustrophobic with subtle shifts in the dynamics of the relationship.’ When it was shown on a brief pre-lockdown run in Bath, the audience were incredibly involved – ‘the issues raised touched a nerve’, she says.
Bailey notices that when the play first came out, the audience by and large were on the side of the male tutor. But this modern audience sees things from both sides. ‘Nothing in the play feels dated. It is so current. It also powerfully questions the value of higher education. Is it necessary? What is it for? Does it only empower the already empowered?’. These of course are touchy subjects for a university city like ours and I would guess the audience at the Arts will come away buzzing with thoughts and questions. Will there be a post-show Q and A? Says Bailey, ‘No. Mamet won’t allow it. He wants people to go away and talk about it but not in the theatre itself.’
Lucy assures us that the two actors Rosie Sheehy and Jonathan Slinger are particularly brilliant and that the theatrical experience is likely to be memorable – but don’t expect a cosy 90 minutes. Mamet’s raw and cascading language is a veritable assault on the senses. It is pure theatre, a drama about now and tomorrow but holding up that essential light to human folly. When it comes to the arrival in Cambridge of this great play, Lucy Bailey is not the only one to be excited.
Oleanna runs at the Cambridge Arts Theatre from Tuesday 8 June to the end of the week and thence on a short tour until landing at the London Arts theatre by mid July.
https://www.cambridgeartstheatre.com/whats-on/oleanna
