Canberra Repertory Society

What do you do when the love of your life and your parents just don’t get along? Ron Cerabona takes a look.

Director Ian Hart says that a lot of Canberra Repertory Society’s theatrical season tends toward comedy and farce. Amy’s View, by David Hare, is, he says, “The first serious play for this year: it really is English literature”.

In fact, he says, the work is “more like music the way it works: themes come back and back, there are changes of key”.
Amy’s View is, he says, “a kind of human comedy in the old-fashioned sense, examining the human condition”.

It does this by focusing on the relationship of three people against a back ground of 16 years of change in Britain, from the election of the Thatcher government in 1979 to the era of the Lloyd’s insurance scandal in 1995. Amy’s View was first produced in London in 1997 with Samantha Bond as Amy and Judi Dench as Esme.

When the Repertory’s play begins, Esme (Naoné Carrel) is a widowed, well-established West End stage actress whose daughter Amy (Ellen Caesar) brings her boyfriend, aspiring film critic Dominic (Martin Searles), to meet her.

But Esme and Dominic take an instant dislike to each other. “Esme is one of the archetypal stage divas of the time,” Hart says, “while he believes theatre is a dead art.”

Amy’s view is that if love is given, it will be returned, but it doesn’t always happen.

The play traces the progress of this awkward triangle over the years as the characters experience ups and down in their lives and careers.

The other characters are Evelyn (Fay Butcher), Esme’s mother-in-law, Frank (David Bennett), Esme’s neighbour who looks after her financial affairs, and Toby (Adrian Flor), a young actor—all of whom have important parts to play as the story unfolds.
“David Hare has got this fabulous ability to create very great tension then break it with a very funny scene, then he can back up again and create even more tension,” Hart says.

This is Hart’s directorial debut at Rep: he has previously directed plays at the Street Theatre including the Australian premiere of Ying Tong: A Walk with the Goons and has also been a documentary filmmaker for 35 years.

Caesar says the audience can watch Amy grow up as the play develops. “She’s a fun character to play … You get to watch her. I start at 21 and end up in my mid-30s.”

The character is introduced, she says, “at that wonderful time in life when you get to introduce your new partner to your mother and get to work out whether your mother was right. Mother’s always right.”

The relationship between Amy and Esme is a close one, Caesar says, and the new boyfriend threatens that closeness.
When Amy introduces Dominic to Esme, hoping to form a new family, the audience will be looking for the differences between mother and potential son-in-law, Caesar says, but it turns out there are a lot of similarities.

Carrel describes Esme and Amy as “a double vaudeville act” that Dominic comes between, shifting attention away from the larger-than-life mother who is accustomed to playing centre stage in her daughter’s life.

“Things happen over time that put Esme off balance. It’s very funny in parts, with all three of them there particularly, as they’re very intelligent, quick quick-witted, and playing off each other.

“Esme plays layers: she’s good at playing one thing and thinking something else underneath, whereas Amy, if she’s got layers, they’re stripped off, one by one.”

Identifying with the character, perhaps, she doesn’t mention Dominic, but Searles, who plays the character as he moves up in the world from critic to television personality to film director is quick to defend him.

“By no means is he ever a villain for the sake of being a villain … He comes from one side of the spectrum, Esme from the other.”

In the artistic class system, he’s the up-and-comer, the new guard, while Esme represents the old regime, and Searles thinks they both have something of value to say even if they’re rather extreme in how they say it. “Amy’s the nice one: she loves them both.”

But will love be enough to keep the family together, against the vicissitudes of the world and despite their own clashes and conflicts?

Times2, The Canberra Times Thursday, April 23, 2009