ARCHIVE TREASURE No. 15
Production: Making Noise Quietly
Written by: Robert Holman
Bush Production Dates: 25th June – 2nd August 1986
Cast: Being Friends
Jonathan Cullen (Oliver Bell, the farmer)
Ronan Vibert (Eric Faber, the artist)
Lost
Jean Boht (May Appleton)
Jonathan Coy (Geoffrey Church)
Making Noise Quietly
Helen Ryan (Helene Ensslin)
Paul Copley (Alan Tadd)
Daniel Kipling (Sam )
Director: John Dove
Designer: Kenny Miller
Lighting Designer: Paul Denby
Sound Effects by: Tom Betteridge
Music Composed and Played by: John Dove
Stage Managers: Lucy Bovington, Malcolm Keen
German Skerries (1977), starring Paul Copley, was Yorkshire born Holman’s first commission for the Bush and secured him the George Devine Award. He went on to produce four more plays here: Outside the Whale (1978); The Estuary (1980) and Making Noise Quietly (1986). A generation of British playwrights have drawn their influences from his work, including: David Eldridge; Simon Stephens; Tim Stark and Sarah Frankcom. Holman wrote Making Noise Quietly in his early 30s, completing the trilogy of short plays in four months and drawing inspiration from the war scenes depicted in his 1984 RSC production of Today. Each play, although complete in its own right, is subtly interwoven and explores a range of themes, from the challenges of family life, intergenerational relationships and meetings between strangers.
His plays are usually set in specific landscapes with out-of-door settings often preferred over domestic interiors. Holman’s texts do not always yield-up their meanings to audiences straightaway. Holman commented on this point in one contemporary interview, “I aim for an emotional rather than a political experience, above all I’m interested in character. Within that framework you can have ideas (and I hope the characters in my plays do take a standpoint) but I don’t find people on stage just talking ideas particularly satisfying. I suppose that if people think my work is oblique it’s because you can’t follow the plays intellectually – the connections come after.” (City Limits, 10th July 1986, interview with Lyn Gardner). Jane Edwardes said of Holman’s characters that they are ‘...both individual and psychologically truthful and it is not surprising that he has won the passionate support of so many actors.’ (Time Out, 2nd July 1986).
The first play in the trilogy, Being Friends, is set in the corner of a field at Oxen Hoath in Kent, July 1944. In the original prompt script the setting is described as ‘..a pasture field and it is rough and undulating. There are one or two molehills.’ Two young men, 25 year old pacifist, farm labourer Oliver Bell and 23 year old myopic artist Eric Faber, meet as the Second World War is drawing to a close. The play is poignant, subdued with beautifully written, lyrical dialogue that is subtly charged with homoerotic undertones. Eric describes to Oliver a novel he has written about a holiday he spent with his father on the south coast, when he was 14. The novel centres on Eric’s experiences at the hands of a troubled school teacher who provided holidays to under privileged boys from the East End. Eric says, ‘he tied my hands together one day rather savagely. For peering at him through the glass window at the hut where he was living. He kept me tied for half an hour whilst he packed-up to go home... I suspect, like many people, he was smouldering inside. His veneer had snapped for a moment... I must have challenged his authority. Like all tyrants, his form of punishments, showed him up for what he really was.’ Critic Lyn Gardner comments that: ‘his [Holman’s] is a skill that eschews polemic and creates a sense of lives lived, of time and place, words unspoken and desires and passion bubbling beneath an outwardly calm exterior. The approach is miniaturist but the plays have enormous reverberative power.’ (City Limits, 10th July 1986).
The second play, Lost, is set in a terraced house in Redcar, Cleveland, June 1982 during the Falklands War. May Appleton, is a middle class woman who learns of the death of her son in the Falklands from Geoffrey Church, a naval officer. Geoffrey was a colleague of her son and also turns out to be the brother of the wife she never knew her son had. Her son achieved career success but developed a snobbish attitude towards his family which resulted in a five year estrangement.
Making Noise Quietly, the third and longest of the three plays, from which the trilogy takes its name, is set in the Black Forest, Germany, August 1986. This three-hander is born out of a chance encounter between a rich Jewish businesswoman, Helene Ensslin, herself a survivor of the concentration camps and a foul-mouthed English squaddie, Alan Tadd. Alan has been saddled with his recently deserted wife’s autistic son, Sam. A troubled boy, Sam steals, refuses to talk and is prone to violent outbursts which tests the patience of Alan and Helene who reach breaking point in their attempts to interact with him. Holman said of his character Alan, ‘..[he] frightens me but I’ve tried to understand what motivates him. The craft is drawing a conclusion, I hope audiences will be sympathetic to his predicament if not to him.’ (City Limits, ibid.)
Interest in Holman’s work has remained strong over the years, resulting in several high profile revivals of Making Noises Quietly:
• 1999 (14th April – 22nd May), Whitehall Theatre. Directed by Deborah Bruce for The Oxford Stage Company;
• 2003 (8th – 15th February), New Venture Theatre, Brighton. Directed by Hannah Price;
• 2003 (2nd – 18th October), ‘Quietly Making Noise’, Royal Exchange, Manchester. A season of plays, readings and other events in honour of Robert Holman;
Peter Gill will direct a further revival of this trilogy, at the Donmar later on this year (19th April-26th May).
If you want to find out more about the Donmar’s production then please click here: http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/pl143.html
Image Caption: Scene from Lost. Jean Boht and Jonathan Coy. Photograph is
by Nobby Clark.
