Sophie Thompson, Suzette Llewellyn. Photo Credit Mark Senior.
Simon Jenner April 19th 2024
A woman sits and plays the piano at St Pancras in 2019. A man, James, catches his breath and someone’s clip goes viral. By April 2024 she’s playing in the Albert Hall. But James’s gasp goes back to 1966 and for 20 years he’s not spoken to her. Samuel Adamson’s The Ballad of Hattie and James opens at the Kiln Theatre directed by Richard Twyman till May 18th.
Hattie’s a prodigy, at 63. It’s an interrupted prodigiousness. ”Do you want to pay primo or secondo, James” she asks him when they meet properly over rehearsing Britten’s Noye’s Fludde in 1976. Hattie’s always primo: it helps her mother inherited a 1910 Bechstein, that also threads its way through the next 60-odd years.
Featuring an enchanting score by Nicola T. Chang and David Shrubsole, and on-stage piano played by Berrak Dyer on this occasion, the play distils to three modes. It’s served by Jon Bausor’s elegantly stripped revolve set, that spins time away and almost functions as time regained, as actors too in Anjali Mehra’s movement set out on a musical carousel of their lives. Simisola Majekodunmi’s lighting is undistracting but lends a haze of timelessness.
First, protagonists Hattie (Sophie Thompson) and James (Charles Edwards) are hardly offstage, and give phenomenal performances, particularly Thompson, whose way of delivering speeches is like (as Hattie might put it) one of Liszt’s virtuosic paraphrases. Being Liszt, as Hattie cheerfully admits to James, rhymes with the vodka-swigging Hattie inherits from her mother.
They’re sometimes joined by the strong presence of Suzette Llewellyn in nearly every other role, and occasionally James’ half-sister Chrissie (an assured Luna Valentine on this occasion), opening out their dynamic. Finally, Dyer’s performances punctuate the often frenetic, intimate and musically-peppered dialogue, as Thompson leans over her, platonically riffing.
The music’s essential, given an ideal bloom in Pete Malkin’s sound design. It gives both heart and lungs to the production, distils the sometimes remote, self-involved dialogue into a breathing space, an affect. It radiates warmth round the play where love seeps through what’s unsaid but can be uttered by Hattie or James when they write and rewrite for each other.
And there – in moments of who wrote what and when – curls the nub of discord, the fractured harmony of their love. They’re both gay and it takes Hattie to tell James that. Conversely no partner remotely has what they have with each other: or shapes them as much as they damage and inspire each other.
Adamson’s whirligig of time hurtles them round from 1976 to 2020 to 1999, 1978, 2024, 1978, 2039 and 1966 – much like the revolve set serving as uncluttered metaphor for the occasionally cluttered but often brilliant language. Dan Light’s video dates arrive slowly, deliberately allowing scenes to focus before popping up dates (sometimes a countdown).
The dialogue’s as precocious as Hattie, in the 1976 section too precious. In 1976 it’s certainly not impossible a 16-year-old British feminist might paraphrase French discourse, but Adamson’s tone and language rarely alters. We’re gifted little in the sense of rapidly-developing adolescents. Only the sheer brilliance of Thompson’s performance suggests otherwise, and Edwards, comfortably strangulated as James, can tag along with flustered interjections.
There’s teen whoops and 1978 reactions to Kate Bush’s debut album The Kick Inside (an LP cover duly appears). Though Hattie’s already onto Fanny Mendelssohn (she doesn’t wait for contemptuous puns from James, but blasts them out herself), Lili Boulanger and Delia Derbyshire (the self-effacing genius arranging the electronics to Ron Grainer’s Dr Who score), it’s all too complete: Hattie arrives fully-armed with nowhere to go, her vulnerabilities round guilt, inherited alcoholism and refusal of the Royal College of Music to recognise her brilliance; unlike James’ more conventional kind.
This is though where Adamson indeed scores. Derbyshire’s electronic-music brilliance filters through Hattie’s first girlfriend, BBC producer Eve: if the RCM can’t glimpse Hattie’s genius, the BBC might.
Sabotage, tragedy and self-sabotage inflicts damage over the years though. Both Hattie and James achieve shiny CDs 25 years apart. The play slowly answers how Hattie did become secondo to a lesser pianist, though as composer – and that’s again where Adamson asks questions of originality and derivativeness. Who played secondo to whom? Adamson’s answer is nuanced.
Thompson delivers dialogue as if slightly restricted, speeded-up through a venturi-tube. Her distinctive timbre here is accentuated to tragi-comedic force, Hattie’s distrait drunk (particularly in the December 1999 scene before the interval) rooted in something terrible that happened, for which James can’t forgive her. Occasionally, Thompson flings round Edwards like a peregrine comet, arms whirled.
Edwards easily slips from priggish Britten-struck schoolboy through buttoned-up teacher adulthood. Both performers exude a strangulated version of what Hattie and James might have been, the actors’ chemistry palpable as they flay each other, then fail to apply balm.
Edwards semaphores James’ stiffness eloquently: what James can’t even unlearn through a first husband who’s a fitness instructor then psychotherapist (then he’s done with James). Only Hattie can unchain James from his starched Death-in-Venice persona: Britten’s opera of a man never acknowledging himself, save self-destructively.
Suzette Llewellyn plays everyone from Hattie’s later partner, academic and protectively hostile Bo, her main role, to teacher Mrs Arbuthnot, James’ stepmother Rosamund and in a beat Hattie’s alcoholic mother Louise. There’s briefly Hattie’s liberated, relaxed first lover – sister of their teacher and that tragically short-lived BBC producer – Eve. Finally, poignantly the protagonists’ first teacher Madame Schultz who dies the year she takes them on, 1966. Latterly Hattie’s academic daughter Frances appears too, though not played by Llewellyn.
It’s the latter scenes of the two-and-a-half-hour play, with speeded jump-cuts and finally a thrilling ride backwards, that lifts its sometimes fragile heart to transcendence where you believe the music’s ache, feel it resolve into the radiantly troubled A major of Hattie’s Ballad.
The Ballad of Hattie and James
Kiln Theatre
Playwright Samuel Adamson, Director Richard Twyman, Designer Jon Bausor, Lighting Designer Simisola Majekodunmi, Sound Designer Pete Malkin, Composers Nicola T. Chang & David Shrubsole, Musical Director David Shrubsole, Movement Director Anjali Mehra, Video Designer Dan Light,
Casting Director Lotte Hines CDG,Costume Supervisor Isobel Pellow, Assistant Director Zoë Templeman-Young
Chalres Edwards, Sophie Thompson – Photo Credit Mark Senior.
