03/03/2024
To See a World in a Grain of Sand
String! at the Grove Theatre, Eastbourne
This review is being written to express my experience of seeing String! – a musical by Tony Biggin and librettist Stephen Plaice – at the Grove Theatre on Friday last. As a member of the compact but sold-out audience I had very little idea what to expect. What transpired was a work of supreme calibre, and which one simply could not believe was being staged in such a petite venue. I am guessing now but this may be what billionaire’s children feel like when Adele or Beyonce play the tent in the back garden at their eighteenth.
But – the top-drawer talent aside – there was something more. To say String! is about Hailsham would be to invoke the same critical solecism which avers that, say, Julius Caesar is about the Italian capital two millennia ago. For the themes - as this play might have it: the shreds, the strands, the yarns. the flax, the fibres. the strings - are twisted and braided together to explore and, in fact, depict the fabric of English society. Narratively, it is both non-linear and impressionistic but the binding material is that precious and all-too-rare elixir: the authentic and the local.
The Great War is present. How could it not be? The numbers connected to the Battle of the Somme are always kind of surprising every time one re-encounters them. I recently heard the following formulation: more British casualties on the first three days than the total number of Americans killed in WWI, Korea and Vietnam put together, for instance. Steve Scott’s doughty Nelson Carter VC would not count among the numbers of this million men massacre because the Somme Offensive began officially on the 1st July 1916. Nelson Carter was mortally wounded, winning a VC in the process, aged 29, at Richebourg l’Avoue – up in Artois - the day before on the 30th June. On this day, within just five hours at the Battle of the Boar’s Head, the Royal Sussex lost 17 officers and 349 men. Over a thousand more were injured. As Plaice’s libretto has it, Christ was not there on ‘the day that Sussex died’.
Those of us who live in Sussex may know that someone - presumably the notorious Richard Beeching - restructured (closed) many railway lines in the 1960s. The play takes us to the last journey made along the Cuckoo Line between Hailsham and Eastbourne. This, of course, could sound winsome and parochial but here it does not, principally due to the implicit modesty of the play’s sensibility. Contextualised as a fleeting moment in the young romance of the central characters –Harriet and Tom – the poetic effect is not absurd melodrama about something so prosaic but instead evokes a whisper of the changes wrought on our towns – let’s say, our lives – by extrinsic forces over which we have minimal awareness and understanding, and zero control.
Ruby Edwards who plays Harriet at age eighteen offers a demur, rational, unsilly girl falling for Tyler Sargent’s lively, besotted Tom. Fast-forward to the present and Tom is dead, Chris Parke’s watchful ghost still present in the home. I remarked earlier in the review that the talent here is of the highest quality. Marcia Bellamy is a mezzo sopranist of note and her bereaved Harriet is the heart of the play. ‘This house, Tom’ which is sung in the depleted marital home resounds with an almost unbearable poignancy combined with a fortitude and resilience which verges on the heroic.
By way of dazzling contrast is her friend Joan who is the more liberated, both morally and maritally, of the two. Joan positively encourages Harriet to join her on the dating scene. Harriet is naturally full of apprehension and hesitation about taking things further with Jozik Kotz’s mild-mannered Robin Foulkes.
This is an enormously talented ensemble – cast and musicians - working with material by two inspired and adroit craftsmen in Plaice and Biggin who actually have something complex, nuanced and powerfully romantic to say. A sun has come out over Hailsham.
Five stars isn’t enough.
- Dan Hill
