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Director: Bernard Smith Performances: Thursday 1st, Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd December at 8pm Upstairs at the Gatehouse, Highgate, N6. There was also a matinee performance on Sunday 4th December at 4pm, The play: First produced at the National Theatre in 1997, the play mixes love, death and the theatre. It is a funny, moving, fascinating play, which examines the relationship between a daughter and her actress mother. |
Director's Notes
Cast & Crew
Rehearsal Photos
Performance Photos
Review
David Hare must be one of our most prolific writers, providing wonderful scripts for actors to work with. Amy's View opened at the National theatre in 1997 and transferred to The Aldwych Theatre and then Broadway. It was a great success with Judi Dench playing Esme Allen. David Hare says the inspiration for the play was drawn from his own memory of first coming upon a genuinely bohemian household, local repertory theatre, and a visit to a Berkshire home of a working painter. It was there, that for the first time, he met adults for whom Art, very definitely, had a capital A. From these impressions, he wrote Amy's View, which is about the value of theatre, cultural change and the decline of England. It is about mothers, daughters, and the tension between in-laws and also about loss, grief and the scouring of the soul: all the ingredients to produce a wonderful evening of theatre. It was the relationships between the characters that made the play so attractive to me and one I wanted to direct. The cast (who I believe will deliver the play’s message) have worked hard to present the Amy's View of which I feel David Hare would approve. Working in this wonderful theatre again is so fantastic; it has just the right atmosphere for the cast to present this production. I do hope you enjoy the play.
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Bernard Smith: Director Bernard joined GST in 1997. He made his acting debut as Brasset in Charley's Aunt and went on to appear in Nicholas Nickleby, The Wind in the Willows, Still Life, As You Like It and The Lady's Not For Burning. He directed Arthur Miller's Broken Glass in 2003 Upstairs at the Gatehouse and has been Stage Manager and Sound Engineer on several productions |
The Players
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Natalie Adzic: Amy Natalie joined GST in the summer to play a female Flute in A Midsummer Nights Dream. Previously she was very involved in the Edinburgh University Theatre Company where she played several leading roles before moving back to London in 2004. |
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Liz Amiel: Esme Liz has been a member of GST for almost 25 years. Her first role was in an open-air production of Twelfth Night. Since then she has had major parts in numerous Shakespeare plays as well as Death and the Maiden, The Visit & Hedda Gabler. She directed The Memory of Water here at the Gatehouse. In 2001 Liz won the Best Actress award at the Isle of Man Festival for her performance as Paulina in Death and the Maiden. |
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Laurence Summers: Dominic Laurence turned his back on a glamorous lifestyle in the theatre to pursue an even more glamorous - and lucrative - one as a teacher. Recent performances for the GST include Mozart in Amadeus & Mr Tumnus in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. |
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Paula Morris: Evelyn Paula also is an award-winning actress at the Isles of Man festival in a supporting role as the secretary in Lettice and Lovage. She has been in many GST productions including An Ideal Husband and Separate Tables for which she won best supporting actress as Miss Meachem. Paula seems to have made a career of interpreting elderly eccentric ladies, Evelyn being the latest. |
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Tim Messom: Frank At school Tim played Shylock and Othello and was a member of the National Youth Theatre. He studied drama at Exeter University and toured for two years as a ringmaster for Circus Hoffman; "the wildest show on earth"! His greatest claim to fame is having the first line - "Who's There?" - in Derek Foulds' Hamlet at the Northcott theatre, with an unknown John Nettles as Fortinbras. Favourite roles have included Theseus in Phaedre, John Proctor in The Crucible and, most recently, the tyrannical father in The Roaring Girl for GST. |
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Adam Snell: Toby When I was 10 I had three minor roles in Alice in Wonderland. After a long time; nine years in fact, I went to audition for Amy's View. I was selected to play the part of Toby Cole, a character very similar to the real me. Working with the cast in this play is incredible; they all took me under their wings helping me a great deal. Hopefully, in the future, I will have the opportunity to work with them again. |
Amy’s View is about many things. It’s about the corrosive effect of money, the greedy eighties, and the random cruelty of capitalism. It’s about the casual philistinism of the arbiters of modern literary taste – a critic complains that in the theatre, people walk across the stage, and he wants to scream “jump cut.” It’s about politics, even though it is not an overtly political play, for David Hare is the most political of playwrights. It’s about the British snobbery that assumes a man with a public school accent can’t be a crook.
But at its heart, it is about the relationship between a mother and her daughter. The mother, a successful actress, loses her money in the great Lloyds Insurance crash of the eighties, while the daughter loses her heart to a man who does not deserve it. If those two parts are played well, it is one of the most effective and affecting plays written in the last two decades. If they falter, the play fails.
The burden on those actresses is one that many successful professionals could not carry. We’re amazingly lucky to have two performers who could. Liz Amiel and Natalie Adzic produced performances to treasure.
From the first moment we saw them on stage together, they were striking sparks from each other, showing they understood their complicated and multi-layered relationship, creating real, complex people before your eyes whom you could believe in and whose fate you cared about.
They developed through the evening. In each new scene, you sensed a new layer of hurtful experience around them. They were always a little understated, always believable, never for one moment descending into mere theatricality.
They did it, as the best actors do, with little things – the right gesture, the right intonation. There’s a moment when Liz Amiel as the mother reaches out to take her daughter’s hand as the daughter walks away from her – a tiny gesture done with such heart-rending restraint that it brings tears to the eyes. There are the mother’s actressy movements and gestures – but you know that they are never just actressy, they are the gestures of someone who has spent so much of her life being other people that she only knows actressy ways to be herself. There are the moments when they sit together on a sofa, comfortable with each other, each knowing that the moment cannot last. There are the moments when Natalie Adzic as the daughter turns on her lover and on her mother, and you can feel the pain it costs her.
These were two very special performances. You don’t often see this quality of acting in professional companies, and it’s very rare indeed to see it in an amateur one.
They had solid backup from the rest of the cast. Paula Morris was entirely believable as Liz Amiel’s elderly, cantankerous mother-inlaw declining through the evening into lachrymose senility.
For my taste, Laurence Summers as Natalie Adzic’s lover was just a shred understated, and I could have done with a little more contrast, but this was a thoughtful, intelligent performance which garnered as much sympathy as possible for a character whom we quickly identified as a self absorbed shit. For my taste, Tim Messom garnered rather too much sympathy as the Lloyds agent who costs Liz Amiel’s character everything she had. He skillfully conveyed the well-bred void where learning and culture should be, but not enough of the low, selfish cunning. But this may just be a difference of interpretation. His performance, as usual with Tim, was solid, believable, and professional.
And Adam Snell produced a delightful cameo as the young actor whom Liz Amiel’s character befriends at the end, all puppyish, star-struck adoration. Adam’s young talent, like Natalie Adzic’s, provides assurance that a new generation is there to ensure a future of top-class performances.
Bernard Smith is making a speciality of this sort of production, using the intimacy of the Gatehouse to direct plays which call for depth of characterisation and restraint. His set, a rather more elaborate one than the Gatehouse normally demands, was well thought out, not obtrusive but providing everything his actors needed.
This production had all the virtues of Broken Glass, the Arthur Miller play he directed at the same venue last year, and added to them the marvellous chemistry and characterisation of Liz Amiel and Natalie Adzic. I seldom enjoy an evening at the theatre as much as I enjoyed this one.
