Keepers of the Flame
By Sean O'Brien
Live Theatre, Newcastle, in association with the
Royal Shakespeare Company
Review
by Peter Lathan (2003)
Newcastle's Live Theatre celebrates its 30th
aniversary this year with a co-production with the RSC, part of the national
compny's Newcastle season. Live has always had a commitment to new writing,
something which RSC artistic director Michael Boyd is also passionate about. It
is fitting, therefore, that this first co-production should be a new play, and
even more fitting that it should be a verse play. Keepers of the Flame
made its first appearance during last year's RSC Newcastle residency, where it
received a public reading as part of a New Writing Festival.
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The play's central character, poet Richard
Jameson (Alan Howard) becomes involved in the British fascist movement in the
1930s, whilst at the same time marrying the rebellious socialist daughter
(Jane, played by Caroline Faber) of leading fascist Sir Henry Exton (David
Rintoul). Drawn into producing marching songs for the fascist mobs, his poetry
dries up and his wife is killed as her beliefs and actions are an embarrassment
to her father. Fifty years later, as Thatcher sweeps to power in Britain, he is
visited by an academic, Rebecca Stone (also played by Faber), an enthusiast for
his poetry, who wants to publish a new edition and write his biography.
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The thirties, however, repeat themselves and this
time it is Rebecca Stone (the surname anglicised from Stein) who is killed, at
the orders of the right-wing Tory MP Judd (also played by Rintoul). Any chance
of his rehabilition is expunged and, at the end, Jameson waits for death,
accompanied by the "ghost" of Francis Finnegan (Deka Walmsley), Exton's
aide-de-camp and the killer of Jane.
Writer Sean O'Brien has a number of plays to his
credit, including two others with Live as well as producing the version of
Aristophanes' The Birds which premiered at the National last year. He
has also written five collections of poems and is Professor of Poetry at the
Sheffield Hallam University.
Directed by Live's artistic director Max Roberts, the
cast are a mixture of Live and RSC actors. One, Donald McBride, has a foot in
both camps, being a Live regular who has also appeared in four RSC productions.
The play's language, although eminently speakable,
has a toughness and density which is welcome - if a little demanding - when
compared to that of much new writing. Quotation and paraphrase abound, from,
inter alia, the Bible, through Langland, Milton, Blake and Clare, to Yeats and
Auden, with references to Jameson's own work thrown in for good measure. Set in
1987, flashbacks to the twenties, thirties and forties slide into each other,
always in chronological order.
The flashbacks emphasise the cyclic nature of the
plot - history is, to a degree, repeating itself - and we see how the "flame"
of fascism is passed on from generation to generation, complete with bully
boys, a complete disregard for human life and perverted patriotism:
Light me a blaze in the city's heart
To burn
all the shadows away.
Pass torch on torch from hand to hand,
Till the
dark streets are bright as the day.
Follow me, brothers, into the blaze
And let
England be England again.
Like the best work in any medium, Keepers of the
Flame makes an immediate impact but continues to reveal its depth long
after the final bows are taken and the house lights have come up.