“NOT QUITE JERUSALEM” BY PAUL KEMBER – AN AWARD WINNING WRITER
“NOT QUITE JERUSALEM” BY PAUL KEMBER – AN AWARD WINNING WRITER – review by Penny Nair Price.
3rdto Sat 28 March. Tues Weds Thurs and Fris – 7.30 Sat 3pm and 7.30 Sat 3.30 only. Monday – closed – theatre only. The bar on ground floor is open as usual.
At The Finborough Theatre – “Probably the Most Influential Theatre in The World” (Time Out) comes this production from talented Director Peter Kavanagh.
Forty years ago this play premiered in London’s Royal Court Theatre having won an Evening Standard Award playwriting comp. Now in all its glory the same comic portrayal of dysfunctional Brits on an Israeli Kibbutz is showing at The Finborough Theatre, Earls Court and wowing an audience of fifty people per night in the most popular pub theatre in Europe. All power to the actors in a team of four men and two women who enchant us into the scenes set in the Israeli Kibbutz where the skills and etiquette of the British workers show distinct signs of taking the proverbial raising hopefully amusement from the audience.
Mike is a drop out from Cambridge whilst Dave and Pete – referred to as “peasants” late in the play, hail from Yorkshire and come looking for love and fun only to find it is very hot and most of the work is unpaid, plus the females “available” are either a tad potty or “unavailable” and keeping away from them. This duo – Dave and Pete – played by Joe McArdie and Ronnie Yorke steal the show in the second half as they warm up for a side-splitting performance at the social night which gets them barred and sent home, so be ready for a few expletives deleted and bawdiness in this part of the play. They finally get allowed to stay after someone pleads for mercy whilst Mike slips away when his new amour – a stunning Israeli Kibbutz Official – Gila (Alisa Joy) packs his bag for him and sends him on his way. Mike has a fun time telling Gila a joke about Stalin and demonstrates his skill with a Russian accent and his personality is in quite stark contrast with the characters of Dave and Steve.
Carrie – Miranda Braun – is tremendously likeable – but prone to lying. She claims to be a nurse but when Ami (Russell Bentley) a Kibbutz worker, cuts his hand on tractor blades, the truth is out. She carries a photograph of her and her “boyfriend” and offers Valium to her friends though she is off them herself. Her interest in painting and art becomes subject of ridicule but throughout she is portrayed as a naive soft and malleable individual. Lampooning the British is very much a core part to the story but it is to increase the comic element of the play. Ami plays a singular role of a man on top of his game who tries to be a father figure to the British workers who he regards as dysfunctional, lazy and lacking direction or focus. Steve is stunned by the rather awesome cheek of the Jewish Kibbutz where foreigners are invited to pay their own air fare and then work for free with the added hope of sowing their wild oats whilst they are there. His lampooning of the meanness of the Jewish businessmen who come up with plans like these shows that no-one is above rebuke in this captivatingly funny drama. It also proves that Pete (Ronnie Yorke) is a very accomplished actor who can turn his hand to mimicry – he and Dave are a well cast “pair”.
The fact that few know anything about the history of Israel and that the British helped to form it is alluded to. Beautiful Israeli women are discussed and Gila is a case in point. Her stunningly loud voice and communist tendencies together with her awesome bossiness with the Kibbutz workers comes through in her powerful role as both waspish diva and forceful characterisation of her part.
The play also makes a statement about the disillusionment of young British people with the Labour Party in freefall and townhouses built for the poor by the rich who leave them for their country homes to cope with modern architecture and modern city dilemmas.
I cannot put in the names of all the talented back stage crew who make productions so well run; the lighting by Ryan Stafford and designer Ceci Calf are included who make the Kibbutz setting so authentic.
ENJOY