Review: THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE, Brockley Jack Studio Theatre, February 25 2016

Brecht is something of an acquired taste, with his fervently polemical plots and "let it all hang out" epic theatre style, and you'll need to buy in to all of that to make the most of The Caucasian Chalk Circle (at the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre until 12 March).

Before the play even starts, Lazarus Theatre's cast are sweeping the floor, offering us biscuits and enquiring about how far we have come - we're in something rather than watching something for sure. We then witness an argument
break out about the best use of land regained in battle, a row that we surmise is taking place in the aftermath of World War II somewhere in the old Soviet Union.

Before long - everything happens at a breakneck pace with all the cast on show and most doing something all the time - we get into the meat of the play and the story of the princely baby abandoned by her mother after a coup and taken up by a peasant woman who grows to love the boy. After a play within a play within a play focused on a judge patently ill-fitted to the role, but whose rustic wisdom is shown to be more humane than the law books, the child ends up inside the eponymous chalk circle and, like Solomon, the judge makes his decision. Having exposed the good and the bad, the thoughtful and the thoughtless and the worthy and unworthy, Brecht lets it be known that that everyone gets their just deserts and leaves us to draw the political moral from that.

It really is an evening to keep you on your toes: apart from the plot's excursions down various byways, there are actors playing multiple roles, hard edged politics argued back and forth, insightful comments on human nature, songs, marching, shouting - it's like a madcap pantomime without the stock characters.

Does it all work? Well, just about. Ashleigh Cordery's Grusha and her baby gives us a fixed point around which the storms blow and director Ricky Dukes keeps her stable enough for the audience to follow closely. Rob Peacock's crazy Judge Azdak satirises the arbitrary nature of justice in an unjust society, but he gives the play a rousing finish too. The soldiers, unsurprisingly as defenders of authority, are given very short shrift!

The effect of it all is something akin to eating a banquet - you enjoy it at the time, even if some of the fare is a little rich and the courses come a bit too quickly. It's better, though, when you have had a chance to digest it all and savour the memory of all those flavours.

Photo Adam Trigg