Simon Jenner May 5th 2024
“We want the old prices!” Strange what sparks a riot in England. One in the Napoleonic era of 1809 might have been about Jacobins, or food riots, even newspaper censorship. It was about raising sixpence on the price of a Covent Garden ticket.
On the 10th anniversary of BOAT – Brighton’s outdoor theatre – Brighton Little Theatre have revived its late founder Adrian Bunting’s Kemble’s Riot; and for the first time here in its final, full-length version lasting two hours, directed by Tess Gill.
It won Best Play at the Brighton Festival on its premiere in 2011, stormed Edinburgh in 2012 and won New York’s ‘Overall Excellence Award’ in 2013. Bunting, who died in 2014 wanted the audience as rioters, for theatre to be fundamentally different from film. Here, in the theatre he bequeathed to friends to complete, he gets his wish. It is though a different play to its earlier, hour-long incarnation.
The plot’s simple but the debate more complex. After an introduction the old theatre burns to the ground killing up to 30 firefighters; not the natural stuff of comedy. However 10 months on the theatre’s rebuilt, Lord Northumberland has torn up his £10,000 loan and the only increased running costs are more complex theatrical equipment. Kemble puts up ticket prices by sixpence.
Agitators though disrupt and lead rioting in the theatre, even the Kemble home for 50 nights. One agitating lawyer Henry Clifford must have spent about eight pounds and fifteen shillings to make his point; but he can afford to. His antagonist Mary Austin leads one section of the audience against Clifford supporting Kemble. The audience is asked to vote, badges handed out; a haranguing match results.
John Kemble (Samuel Masters) and his sister Sarah Siddons (Amy Brangwyn) are the age’s theatrical royalty. In a prologue written after the original version, and the finer for it, petulant drunkard and broken-hand-brawling actor George Cooke (Leigh Ward, also assistant director) holds forth in stentorian vein on his challenges: first to Brangwyn’s Siddons, then to newcomer Dorothy Jordan (Rosa Alempour). Ward’s energy is later used to leading a revolt from within the theatre.
Alempour’s performance is witty and poised, respectful of and slyly undermining of Siddons. She’s another who projects well, at a different force to the tragic Siddons. Jordan nuances the rise of an eyebrow. “I’m a great admirer of you, as is my mother.” Where she flourishes is in being badgered to take sides: management or the audience who pay to see her. Her equivocations gradually shift before our eyes.
She’d been headhunted by Kemble, whose glancing words to her “I know who you are” are the only ones directed to her throughout a flurried rehearsal. Masters conveys the same arrogance found in April de Angelis’s The Divine Mrs S just finished at Hampstead. De Angelis’ Kemble is a frantic schemer. Bunting’s is a Kemble who’s backed himself into a sixpence and can’t find a tail to back his head out of. Masters, following Bunting, plays for laughs, vivid in caricature.
Masters, also inhabiting Kemble’s royal bemusement, enjoys like Ward a voice that penetrates without distortion. In an outdoor space it’s welcome, rarer than one would like.
Masters edges Bunting’s farcical sense of what Kemble thought he should be attempting: to replicate pronunciation in Shakespeare’s time. No-one understands his “except-ion” or every other word deployed to riotous lengths.
Brangwyn’s Siddons is definitive in any version, giving the finest performance: both in declamation and self-parody of tragic roles. Less accentually bizarre than her brother, this Siddons throws attitudes as if at charades. These find an echo in Kemble’s physical performance which at one point involves flapping his cloak about like a demented crow.
Brangwyn starts from steely Lady Macbeth-isms to get Kemble to screw his courage to the funding place, in rebuilding the theatre – the point where the old play started – through defiance at riots to dawning realisation of what these grievances will cost. The body of the play is how each of the quartet – Cooke then Jordan, finally Siddons reflect on their position.
The additional early scenes add weight and character. The latter are mixed. Though seemingly improvised, it’s scripted and dilates in a debate that might be shortened. That said, it’s invigorating and the cast never flag.
Henry Clifford (Michael Grant) cut a memorable Marlowe in last year’s BLT/BOAT Shakespeare in Love, and here bestrides a similar gadfly-stinging role with energy and relentless goading. Sadly no information or characterisation discovers Clifford’s motives.
Invading theatrical space, he’s countered by Mary Austin (Tahsina Choudrey) making her stage debut leading Kemble’s supporters. Choudrey enjoys Austin’s rationale with a winning plea for theatre and respect; though an outdoor theatre is a baptism for vocal projection. Austin is even more shadowy than Clifford, leaving Choudrey with even less to play with. The audience bay with witty contributions; some finally invade in a decorous procession.
Contemporary protests need no underscoring, from Just Stop Oil and later, to the anti-globalisations and Iraq war fresh in Bunting’s mind. The ethics of disruption are set out: its effects and how poorer people are deprived of their theatre versus the privileged lawyer’s protests led from self-appointed hubris.
Yet one leaves unsatisfied as the script enlarges on these themes without providing an epilogue: a brief one delivered by Ward doesn’t enlighten. Did Kemble reinstate prices soon after? They’re not 17.5p now so at some point they rose, though cost of living flatlined for 30 years till the late 1840s. What prompted Lord Northumberland’s gesture? That relationship with Kemble begs a play in itself.
Steven Adams’ set is an ingeniously simple triptych of boards where cloths are draped – one for licking fire as the original theatre burns, a white and gold opulence for the new theatre whose grandeur causes all the trouble. A table and two chairs, and it’s all wigs. thereafter
Christine Fox’s strictly period costumes don’t extend to Clifford and Austin, who might have been camouflaged in cloaks, then spring forth from the audience in period dress. Instead, they sport their own apparel planted in the audience. Two modern-dress ‘Heavies’ Kevin Aylward and Rosalind Caldwell seem not to be the (unnamed) two rival violinists who perform ‘The Merry Month’ of May in dizzying variations then come together. It’s extraordinary playing on an outdoor matinee. The audience are led in the national anthem then a song on Kemble himself, to the tune of “What shall we do with the drunken sailor”.
Gill has wrought great energy from the cast, is a little hampered by a script that though adding weight and depth in the first part before the fire, now loses focus in the antiphonal sprawl of debate. This could be usefully telescoped. And a factual epilogue drily delivered to underscore the irony. That said, this is still a unique theatrical experience, and in its protean way, will return.