Powerful impact of relevance

by Peter Wilkins published in Times2 on Tuesday May 5 2009.

Amy's View - Directed by ian Hart. Designed by Quentin Mitchell. Canberra Repertory Sociecty, Theatre 3. Until May 23

In his professional autobiography, Writing Left Handed, playwright David Hare says, "I write love stories...And the view of the world love provides, the dislocation it offers, is the most intense experience that many people know on earth. And I write about politices because the challenge...is to ask whether the criteria by which we have been brought up are right."

With the skillful, surgical analysis of the satirist and the compassionate sentiment of the humanitarian, Hare deftly knits together in Amy's View the intertwined seams of comedy and tragedy that mark his personal and political view of the human condition.

The play's construct charts the inevitable consequences of anti-thetical forces that contradict Amy Thomas's romantic view that love will conquer all - past versus future, youth versus age, loyalty versus betrayal, honesty versus deceit and reality versus fantasy all test notions of love and loyalty in Canberra Repertory's production

Written in four acts and spanning 16 years from Margaret Thatcher's rise to power in 1979 to the collapse of Lloyd's of London insurance in 1995, Amy's View traces the rise and fall in fortunes of West End actress Esme Allen (Naoné Carrel) and her relationship with her dauther Amy Thomas (Ellen Caesar) and Amy's partner and aspiring film-maker Dominic Tighe (Martin Searle)

Esme's eventual decline, brought about by ill-advised and disastrous investment in Lloyd's, is the inevitable consequence of the individual's powerlessness to grasp the reality of a changing world. Hare's prophetic commentary on individual versus state power offers a sobering warning for a contemporary world, shackled by the global financial crisis, while reaching out for a new political order.

Director Ian Hart's measured and intelligent direction presents audiences with an entertaining and thought-provoking staging of Hare's politics of human experience. However, Hart's preoccupation with subtlety too often leads his cast to underplay in a style more suited to film than the stage. A fine case, headed by the stalwart Carrel, appears unnecessarily restrained by internalised emotion, so that the final, powerful impact of each individual's personal loss is diminished.

However, there is still much to enjoy and to contemplate in this rarely performed and thoroughly relevant play by a leading commentator on our time.

Article includes a rehearsal photograph with the caption Naoné Carrel as Esme Allen and Martin Searle as Dominic Tighe in a scene from Amy's View.