Not About Nightingales

 Tobacco Factory 

Five or six Jean Valjeans are languishing in an American jail in the late 1930s. They are serving long sentences for stealing tinned food and embezzling cash from the convenience store. The governor is a psychopath who flogs and tortures the inmates. Although the men are mainly seen to complain about being given too much spaghetti, the chaplain says that there have been several deaths from food-poisoning. An unemployed woman takes a job in the prison and forms a kind of relationship with the governor. She threatens to report the abuse to the authorities. One inmate has become an informal trustee, informing the governor about what is going on in the cell blocks in the hope of getting early parole. He makes friends with the new employee. After a well-liked, naive and prayerful inmate dies, a radical incites the men to start a hunger strike. The governor puts them in solitary confinement in a boiler room, turning the radiators up to maximum and refusing them food and water. Several of the men die, and the governor is killed in the ensuing riot. The trustee possibly escapes.

Not About Nightingales has all the humour and joie de vivre one expects from Tennessee Williams. It was written early in his career, six years before The Glass Menagerie, never performed, thought lost, and personally rediscovered by Vanessa Redgrave as late as 1998.

This production, in the Tobacco Factory's tiny Spielman space, is put on by graduates of the new-ish Bristol School of Acting. I was intrigued by the play and thought that the actors carried it off very well. The characterisations are strong: the young inmate who expects his lawyers to get him out in a matter of weeks; the tough-guy radical who wants to stand up for his rights; the slightly damaged trustee who tries to use four syllable words; the woman who can see what is wrong with the system but daren't speak out because she desperately need the job. Several interesting ideas are touched on: the governor briefly justifies his brutal regime because he needs to keep several thousand murderers and rapists under control, even though the characters we actually see have all been convicted of relatively minor offences. The convict who helps out the governor is educating himself, and writing poetry, which is implied to be a means of redemption. He has studied Keats, but his own poetry is "not about nightingales".

But I was left confused by the production, and unclear as to how much of what I was seeing came from Williams' script and how much was theatre-school experimentation. The evening opens with a pair of outrageously camp tour guides ushering the audience into the theatre; there is a foam-filled bath-tub on the stage, and a character in clown make-up crouches motionless in what appears to be a fish-tank. Several characters take fully-clothed baths, and when asked to look up an inmate's details in the filing system Jim (the trustee) instead picks up a rubber duck. There is much stomping and chanting -- sometimes to good effect, as when the hunger strikers sing one line of Which Side Are You On repeatedly -- but sometimes much more wearingly. One of the guards acts as a surreal narrator figure, introducing each scene as "Chapter One", "Chapter Two", "Chapter Three". While introducing one of the hunger strike scenes, he opens a tin of chocolates and takes out a fish. There are a couple of moments where things turn strangely meta: the governor says that "this play" has changed him, one of the inmates says that he means "this place" and they shout "play" and "place" at each other repeatedly. But in between these impressionistic sequences, we get what is identifiably Tennessee Williams' dialogue. The playwright is not above breaking the fourth wall: the Glass Menagerie has a narrator who knows he's a narrator, and Two Character Play is a play about actors rehearsing a play about actors rehearsing a play. But in this case I couldn't alway tell what was part of the text and what was a directorial comment. (That kind of thing is excusable in Macbeth, which everyone knows already; but less excusable in a fairly obscure and rarely performed piece which most of us are seeing for the first time.)

I verily believe that the American prison system in the 1930s was hideous. In the ensuing ninety years, it has (I assume) improved in some respects but not in others. I understand the play to be based on a real incident; but the specifics of the story don't seem to have obvious applicability to the present day. The non-naturalistic elements of the production were quite striking, and it was clearly a very strong cast, but the production ideas tended to distance me from the action, holding the story at arms length. I will be interested in seeing other work by this theatre group and will track down a copy of the original text.

I have no idea why there was a moose's head above the bathtub.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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