The West Yorkshire Playhouse have revived Simon Stephen’s play ‘Country Music’ in the first professional production since its premiere at The Royal Court in 2004. Following the precedent of the original production, which was presented to the prisoners at Wandsworth Jail, it will go on to tour Yorkshire prisons.
The story follows troubled Jamie Carris who is all too familiar with the harsher side of reality as the result of a disrupted home life and intermittent involvement with the care system. We first meet Jamie in a car with his girlfriend Lynsey. Initially they seem like a typical teenage couple, charmingly naive as they fantasise about a future together, but we soon realise that this is something darker when we discover that the car is stolen and blasé references are made to various crimes, revealed to be increasingly violent as the scene progresses.
The next time we meet Jamie it is in prison and the rest of the play reveals the complexities of being incarcerated and the effect this has on the prisoner’s relationships in the outside world.
The creative team are lead by emerging directors Lisa Blair and Eleanor While and this is an impressive and accomplished professional debut for them. The direction of this production is fresh and bold and exciting. Most impressive are the atmospheres generated through lengthy, immersive silences. The rhythm of the piece undulates wonderfully from hopeful to tragic and then back again resulting in an emotional-roller-coaster-churning sensation that lingers for hours after the performance has finished.
The set designed by Hannah Sibai portrays the debris of a shabby, disrupted existence. Amidst Formica furniture and an eclectic mix of chairs and mattresses, bashed up bags and suitcases gape open emptily. The jumble of junk conjures up images of bed-sits and half way houses and DSS B&Bs; all piled up to represent a tip, a wasted, incoherent, transient life. The design is impressively visceral, the lamps that protrude from the chaos offer a sense of optimism and unfulfilled potential that echo in the final scene where we meet Jamie before he commits his crime, in a happier time of summer sunshine and first kisses.
Louise Brealey as ‘Lynsey’ and ‘Emma’, Philip Correia as ‘Matty’ and Joe Marsh as ‘Jamie’ all achieve an incredibly powerful contemporary realism. Their performances are so closely observed and human that at times I feel like I am intruding on real personal life events. The play is deeply dramatic and the characters and relationships are utterly confused and conflicted, experiencing a range of unfamiliar and difficult emotions in any given moment. The three performers are unfaltering in a very economic and intense play that demands considerable skill and attention to detail. It is no surprise that they are repeatedly drawn back to the stage at curtain call.
This production is a gripping interpretation of a very powerful play and I am certain of its success in engaging the prisoners who will see it when it goes on tour and anyone who catches it at the Courtyard Theatre.
Runs until 26th June at West Yorkshire Playhouse for box office telephone 0113 213 7700.