The Skin of Our Teeth
- by Thornton Wilder 2004 [Young Vic production]
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27th February - 10th April 2004
1942. New Jersey, USA. Welcome to the
world of Mr and Mrs Antrobus, a remarkable family who have survived
every catastrophe throughout history by 'the skin of their teeth'. With
a new Ice Age on its way, dinosaurs on the front lawn and the end of
the world due in 24 hours, will they be so lucky this time?The Skin of
Our Teeth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1942. In our world of American
supremacy and imminent ecological disaster, the day of Wilder's
philosophical comedy has come again.
http://www.maureen-beattie.moonfruit.com/
Comments:
"Utterly Irresistible" - The Guardian
"Werid and wonderful - A show that
makes you laugh and think - The Daily Telegraph
"Vital and wonderful piece of theatre
- a tremendously exciting and profound stage fable" - New
York Herald Tribune
"The lines sing - The jokes sting" -
Time Out Critics Choice
Cast:
- Maureen Beattie
- Bette Bourne
- Abby Ford
- Junix Inocian
- Emma Kershaw
- Alex Kew
- Camille Litalien
- Yael Loewenstein
- Simon Rice
- Jason Rowe
- Jonas Armstrong
- David Troughton
- Indira Varma
- Golda Rosheuvel
- Tim Sutton
Creative
Team:
- Direction
David Lan
- Design
Richard Hudson
- Costumes
Jackie Galloway
- Choreography
Kate Flatt
- Sound
Paul Arditti
- Lighting
Bruno Poet
- Music
Tim Sutton
Plot -
Act I
Act one is an amalgam of early 20th century New Jersey and the dawn of
the Ice Age. The father is inventing things such as the lever, the
wheel, the alphabet, and multiplication tables. The family (the
Antrobuses) and the entire north-eastern U.S. face extinction by a wall
of ice moving southward from Canada. The story is introduced by a
narrator and further expanded by the family maid, Sabina. There are
unsettling parallels between the members of the Antrobus family and
various characters from the Bible. In addition, time is compressed and
scrambled to such an extent that the refugees who arrive at the
Antrobus house seeking food and fire include the Old Testament judge
Moses, the ancient Greek poet Homer, and women who are identified as
Muses.
Act II
Act II takes place on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, NJ, where the
Antrobuses are present for George's swearing-in as president of the
Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans. Sabina is
present, also, in the guise of a scheming beauty queen, who tries to
steal George's affection from his wife and family. Although the
conventioneers are rowdy and partying furiously, there is an
undercurrent of foreboding, since the weather signals change from
summery sunshine to hurricane to deluge. Gladys and George each attempt
their individual rebellions, and are brought back into line by the
family. The act ends with the family members reconciled and,
paralleling the Bibilical story of Noah's Ark, directing pairs of
animals to safety on a large boat where they survive the storm and/or
the end of the world.
Act III
The final act takes place in the ruins of the Antrobus' former home. A
devastating war has occurred; Maggie and Gladys have survived by hiding
in a cellar. When they come out of the cellar we see that Gladys has a
baby. George has been away at the front lines leading an army. Henry
also fought, on the opposite side, and returns as a general. The family
members discuss the ability of the human race to rebuild and continue
after continually destroying itself. The question is raised, 'is there
any accomplishment or attribute of the human race of enough value that
its civilization should be rebuilt'?
The stage manager interrupts the play-within-the-play to explain that
several members of their company can't do their parts because they're
sick (possibly with food poisoning: the actress playing Sabina claims
she saw blue mold on the lemon meringue pie at dinner). The stage
manager drafts a janitor, a dresser, and other non-actors to fill their
parts, which involve quoting philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle
to mark the passing of time within the play.
The alternate history action ends where it began, with Sabina dusting
the living room and worrying about George's arrival from the office.
Her final act is to address the audience and turn over the
responsibility of continuing the action, or life, to them.
The
Skin of Our Teeth By Thornton Wilder - Young Vic
Review by Philip Fisher (2004)
This play, written in 1942 is a rich
post-modern analysis of the human condition. It contains three vastly
differing acts and with director David Lan's inventiveness and a strong
cast presents a very thought-provoking and entertaining evening.
The play centres on the Antrobus
family but
also their maid, the sulky, uppity and generally too pretty Sabina,
played with great humour by Indira Varma who clearly knows how to work
an audience. This is necessary as the production demands that many of
the actors pull in and out of character and requires a level of
audience participation more commonly seen in pantomimes.
The first two acts are clearly
biblical in
origin, while the third may have influences in both Revelations and the
commencement of Genesis.
At the start, we see Mr and Mrs Antrobus, played by the wonderfully
magisterial David Troughton and the frantic Maureen Beattie, at their
home in New Jersey in 1942. All seems well, although the weather is
chilly in midsummer. One begins to smell a rat as their pet dinosaur
and mammoth invade the living room in search of heat.
This superb play-within-a-play is worked out on Richard Hudson's
traverse set that has a few shocks in store of its own. The Ice Age has
arrived with a vengeance and Mr Antrobus, the inventor of the wheel, of
the alphabet and multiplication tables, tries to hold his world
together in the face of a coming apocalypse.
He is not helped by his son, Jonas Armstrong as Henry, who has the mark
of Cain on his forehead with good reason. What we have is a combination
of farce, horror-movie and biblical epic of the Creation that never
fails to entertain and grip its audience. There are even guest
appearances from Moses and Homer to add philosophical weight.
The second act sees the family at a kind of Coney Island fair and
pleasure beach as a different natural disaster, a flood is impending to
spoil the celebrations for the 5,000th wedding anniversary of President
and Mrs Antrobus.
The problem is slightly different now
as sin
is the main focus, with the President seduced by Miss Varma as scarlet
seductress, beauty queen Miss Fairweather and daughter Gladys (played
by Abby Ford) only too keen to emulate the Queen.
As the partying continues, the end of
the
world seems all too nigh and a deluge approaches. Ultimately, noble
Antrobus has to choose between temptation and the frumpish Mrs
Antrobus, whose main aim is to keep the family together, not to mention
the biblically necessary animals of the Earth.
The shorter final act after the second interval, is heralded by even
more shocking inventiveness from Messrs Lan and Troughton. For once,
they go too far over the top in their efforts to shock and sober up
their audience.
The family have now arrived in New
Jersey
after a post apocalyptic war and are trying to get back together. The
cheery Sabina has flourished as ever and Gladys is now a mother.
Antrobus and Henry are bitter enemies and now perhaps there is a sign
of how power moves down through generations.
With a little help from three philosophers in the audience, the play
eventually moves full circle back to the start of time or at least the
living room in 1942.
This is a very inventive production and occasionally the director tries
to be a little too clever rather letting the play do its own work. It
is at times shocking, funny and philosophical and is graced with a
strong cast happy to ad lib wittily.
In that it is hardly ever seen, one
would be
recommending a visit to The Skin of our Teeth anyway. In this exciting,
if sometimes slightly flawed version that recommendation is increased
tenfold.
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The
Skin of Our Teeth (Young Vic Theater, London; 350 seats; 25 pounds top)
Review
by Matt Wolf
A Young Vic presentation of a play by Thornton Wilder in three acts.
Directed by David Lan.
Mr. Antrobus - David Troughton
Mrs. Antrobus - Maureen Beattie
Henry - Jonas Armstrong
Sabina - Indira Varma
Gladys - Abby Ford
Fortune Teller - Bette Bourne
The Young Vic makes another brave foray into the American repertoire
(the Langston Hughes rarity "Simply Heavenly" was its last) with "The
Skin of Our Teeth," Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winner that is
considerably more of an oddity in Blighty than it has traditionally
been back home. Whether London auds will find the audacious programming
warranted will depend on their fondness for the play itself, a
curiosity that in 2004 comes across as some sort of lumbering
cross-pollination between Aesop and Tony Kushner at his most
millennially apocalyptic.
On top of that is the issue of Young Vic a.d. David Lan's long
(three-hour) production, which takes Wilder's enormously weighty slice
of whimsy Very Seriously Indeed: Never before have I been tempted to
think of a writer regarded (often mistakenly) as cozily homespun as a
kind of American equivalent to Pirandello, who spends more time
breaking down the fourth wall than New Jersey's beleaguered Antrobus
family does fending off every possible woe known to man.
Those setbacks, you'll recall, include an advancing ice age, floods and
a seven-year war, as they are seen to besiege the uber-inventor Mr.
Antrobus (David Troughton), his fiercely protective wife, Maggie
(Maureen Beattie), their children Henry (Jonas Armstrong) and Gladys
(Abby Ford) and a vampish maid, Sabina (Indira Varma), possessed of a
remarkable penchant for commenting on the action: "This would never go
on at the National Theater," Varma's sleek if oddly accented Sabina
remarked at one point. (Maybe at Nicholas Hytner's National ... )
Basic intrigue carries you through the three acts (one can only dream
of what Tallulah Bankhead and a young Montgomery Clift must have been
like in the original Elia Kazan production), even if Wilder's
gamesmanship has sapped one's interest well before Sabina's closing
farewell.
"Skin of Our Teeth," Wilder once wrote, "mostly comes alive under
conditions of crisis," and just as Wilder's earlier "Our Town" often
surprises viewers with its abiding nihilism, so does this more
calamitous script come down on the side of a very American fortitude
and resilience that, the playwright suggests, are what have got the
near-mythic Antrobus Everyfamily through 5,000 years.
Wilder wrote the play during wartime for a Broadway audience that was
itself at war, and you have to wonder what spectators at the Plymouth
Theater made of Mr. Antrobus' reference to his family "all covered in
blood." At the Young Vic, the response is general bemusement, whether
one is clocking the arrival in the first act of Homer and Moses or the
citations from Spinoza near the end. Small wonder the recent Kander
& Ebb musical version of this play, "Over and Over," was
perceived
to have problems in tone: Wilder's material defies all efforts to unify
a cosmic pinwheel that stops long enough to announce itself as a fairly
leaden philosophical caprice.
Lan's approach attempts to impose a kind of gallows humor on
proceedings, coupled with a vaudevillian knockabout style that suits
the second-act foray to Atlantic City (not to mention lyrics rhyming
"skunk who'll lie" with "homunculi"). To that end, one has to applaud
Kate Flatt's choreography, which sustains momentum even as Richard
Hudson's traverse-style set is slowly giving way beneath the cast, in
accordance with a world hell-bent on destruction.
And the actors, too, override the bizarre faux-Brooklynese that passes
for virtually all American accents in the British theater these days,
with a conviction ranging from hammy (Armstrong, out of his element as
the son) to robust (Beattie's tenacious wife) to poignant (the great
Bette Bourne, here cast a movingly prophetic Esmeralda, the
fortune-teller).
Not content merely to play Wilder's scripted interruptions of his own
text (many of which demand updating in any case), the company
occasionally turn into Ice Age versions of Pirandello's six characters
-- even if Pirandello's existential masterwork, beautifully served
several seasons ago at the Young Vic, stops some way short of a
scene-stealing dinosaur/mammoth double-act.
The riskiest of these interpolations kicks off the third act, with
Troughton's Mr. Antrobus all too plausibly remarking that four members
of the company "had an incident" during the second intermission and so
will be unable to perform, thereby forcing the cancellation of the rest
of the play. On opening night, I'm told, one esteemed critic mistakenly
took Mr. Antrobus at his word and began scurrying up the aisle. Or
maybe, not at all mistakenly, he was simply grabbing his chance to go.
Sets, Richard Hudson; costumes, Jackie Galloway; lighting, Bruno Poet;
music, Tim Sutton; choreography, Kate Flatt; sound, Paul Arditti.
Opened March 4, 2004. Reviewed March 6. Running time: 3 HOURS.
With: Golda Rosheuvel, Simon Rice, Tim Sutton, Camille Litalien, Yael
Loewenstein, Alex Kew, Emma Kershaw, Junix Inocian, Jason Rowe.
Trivia - David Troughton is Sam Troughtons Father [Much - Robin Hood]
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