Edward Albee loved Thornton Wilder’s 1938 paean to ordinary people, set over 12 years at the start of the 20th century in the sleepy New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners (population 2,642). But he hated that “everyone performs it like it was a Christmas card”. He would have no such complaints about Sarah Frankcom’s austere yet tender revival, which uses the British actors’ natural accents – except for the American-inflected narrator-cum-stage manager (Youssef Kerkour) who moves the drama along and comments on the action.
Frankcom’s production keeps the lights on in the auditorium for most of the duration and dispenses with the normal demarcations of space between actors and audience. For a long time you can’t quite work out who is a performer and who isn’t.
But that’s only right and proper, because the fictional Grover’s Corners is clearly our town too. Wilder’s pageant of hatches, matches and dispatches heartily embraces Shakespeare’s line that “all the world’s a stage” – and, in this case, the men and women are mostly bit-part players. We glimpse, in turn, the milkman going about his daily round, the doomed paper boy whose life will be snuffed out in the war, the town drunk, mothers making breakfast and one father with his daughter and another berating his son.
We never really get to know anybody apart from would-be farmer George (a fine debut from Patrick Elue) and the smart, vivacious Emily, played with luminous intensity by Norah Lopez Holden, who was such a memorable Desdemona at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory earlier this year.
It’s schoolmates turned lovers Emily and George who are the linchpins as the play turns darker and settles down for a final act in the town graveyard, where the dead converse with each other. The drama’s bleak honesty about our inability to appreciate our lives as we live them, combined with its formal inventiveness, makes you wonder why it has become so associated with sentiment and folksiness.
The show features a community choir, but Frankcom makes it sing in more ways than one. In paring it back to the bone, she ensures universality and emotional punch: a late coup de théâtre feels entirely earned. In the wake of the Manchester bombing, a play that celebrates the extraordinary in ordinary lives has undoubted resonance. Frankcom and her company don’t just reclaim Our Town from the accumulated dust of its performance history, they claim it for this city.
- At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 14 October. Box office: 0161-833 9833
