Review: TROUBLE IN TAHITI, Grimeborn Festival, Arcola Theatre

One of the delights of the Arcola’s annual Grimeborn Festival is the sheer unexpectedness of what might appear before you. Opera may loom in the public’s consciousness as fat people screeching for three hours while you sit in a seat that cost two  David Tennant’s worth in the West End, but it is, obviously, so much more than that. Nowhere is that more evident than at Grimeborn and nowhere in this year’s festival do I expect it to be more evident than in this little gem of a piece by Leonard Bernstein (music and libretto).

“Am I even in the right show?” is a question that must have crossed minds as three singers (Tim Burton, Izzi Blain and James Wells) tell us of the delights of post-war, white, affluent suburban American life. The Trio sing close harmony that has plenty of barbershop, a soupçon of jazz and swing to spare, a reminder that Bernstein would slink away from the day job as a professor and conductor to play in New York’s dive bars until the small hours, not so much a double life as an extra one.

The two singers take the stage, sitting a small table’s width from each other, but with a cavernous gap separating their emotional lives. Immediately, the seven-piece orchestra (playing beautifully under Olivia Tait’s baton) strike up the spiky chords and choppy rhythms that we know so well from the conflicts between The Sharks and The Jets in West Side Story. Before a word is sung, we know where this couple are, suburban idyll or not.

We follow over their day, Peter Norris’s Sam, all alpha-male entitlement, over-invested in his handball team at the gym; Alexandra Meier’s Dinah, a ball of seething resentment as her husband’s dismissal of her emotional and sexual needs gnaws at her soul. All the exposed brickwork makes for unsympathetic acoustics, with Norris perhaps a tad underpowered and Meier occasionally overcooked, but, more importantly, they catch the emotional pain of a car crash relationship as expressed so differently by a middle-class husband and wife.

I found myself sneaking a quick look at the programme to check that this was indeed a 1952 work, as its themes of alienation, of the ennui lurking within the consumer society and of the inability of men and women to communicate after the love has gone, only really reached our shores in the 1970s, with sitcoms like The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin and punk rock’s skewering of conventional mores.  

With The Trio’s frequent interventions to insist that Sam and Dinah have never had it so good (the harmonies are still gorgeous, their message still upbeat, but the feeling grows that they doth protest too much), the day closes on a half-hearted attempt to make the best of it, something Bernstein must have witnessed from his own parents who were the inspiration for this 45 minutes of compact, thoughtful, worrisome entertainment.

As a postscript, I looked up the USA’s divorce rate in 1952 - 2.9%. There must have been an awful lot of Sams and Dinahs grinning and bearing it behind the manicured lawns and double garages. There’s still a fair few today.    

Trouble in Tahiti is at the Arcola Theatre until 12 August  

Photo: Caz Dyer

   

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