Little Women at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast

 LITTLE WOMEN by Louis May Alcott directed by Emily Foran at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 7th February 2024

Marty Breen, Maura Campbell, Maura Bird and Tara Cush in Little Women

The main theme of Little Women is stated at the beginning of this adapted version of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel, “men have to work and women have to marry for money.”  It seems that Little Women will be a story in the Jane Austen mould, but this is not to be.  The narrative is overshadowed by the events of the American Civil War.  The head of the family, Mr March, has gone to the front to serve as a chaplain in the Union army.  Details of tumultuous battles like Bull Run, fought in Virginia, emerge, but the war hardly impinges on the lives of the four March sisters, Amy, Jo, Beth and Meg and their mother Abigail.  The story concerns the upbringing and development of young women, their quest for individuality, fulfilment, and independence.

Marty Breen in Little Women at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast


The novelistic and autobiographical source of the play is never far away, and the real aim of the work is winter jollification and merriment which, of course, is entirely fulfilled.    The story begins at Xmas with an Xmas tree, decorations, and Xmas carols being sung and performed on piano.  The sisters work together, perform together, and, sometimes, fall out together.  There are signs of hard times, Jo’s dress is torn and patched with dark, contrasting materials.  The sisters are committed to helping the poor families of the neighbourhood through courses and private tuition.  Eventually Beth succumbs to scarlet fever when on one of these visits, an illness treated today with anti-biotics, but for which there was no cure in the 19th century. The seasons are also important as they are in all family melodramas.  Nature’s pattern somehow reinforces the sense of continuity and tradition.  The girls wear dresses which echo the colours of the seasons.  They are also displayed in the backdrop which subtly alters throughout the play.

Ruby Campbell in Little Women at the Lyric Theatre


The set décor is sparsely decorative, a cross section of a house with two stories, bare trees, and sky.  Sometimes the sky darkens and a full moon emerges.  The division between upstairs, a private space for Jo where her imagination can find freedom and she the privacy she craves, and downstairs, another world where the sisters mingle together.  Jo, played in a focussed and committed manner by Marty Breen, is the central character of the drama.  She clearly stands in for the author, it is her determination to break away from a pre-determined marriage to Laurie or Theodore Laurence played by Cillian Lenaghan, that is the fulcrum of the drama.  Laurie is a character limited by circumstance and gender.  Eventually he marries Jo’s sister Amy, who leaves for Europe with rich aunt March.  In Europe she visits Ireland, the Lyceum theatre in London to see Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Paris.  Jo gravitates to New York, taking up a position as a governess, meeting Professor Friedrich Bhaer played by Ash Rizi.  Bhaer has left Berlin, one of the burgeoning populous of newly arrived immigrants, seeking to re-establish their lives in the New World.  Jo is jealous of Amy’s travail to the Old World since she had hoped to visit such places as the library in Heidelberg, but Bhaer reminds her that many Europeans are seeking to escape, dreaming only of New York.  Jo has begun writing trashy, sensationalist fiction for emolument, something which Bhaer disapproves of.

Cillian Lenaghan in Little Women at the Lyric Theatre


Music is an important counterpoint to the unfolding narrative, in terms of the traditional hymns and carols that the sisters sing, marking the passing of seasons and festivals, the polka music heard distantly at the local dance, and a muted score played discretely between scenes.  John Brook, Laurie’s tutor, asks Meg for marriage as he departs for the front.  Meg is reluctant, declaring that 200,000 have already died and the Union army is in retreat.  Eventually Meg marries Laurie’s tutor John Brook and has twins.  Their father is wounded and taken to a field hospital near Washington.  Jo sacrifices her long tresses for $25, money sent to make her fathers convalescence more comfortable.  The ensemble cast orchestrates the action seamlessly, providing the audience with amusement, engagement, and fun.

Ruby Campbell and Shaun Blaney in Little Women


Little Women is clearly a play for our time, when war and crisis are never far away.  It celebrates duty, compassion, and the desire to take a stand and make life distinctive and personal.

Marty Breen in Little Women at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast


Paul Murphy, Lyric theatre, February 2024

Tara Cush in Little Women at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maharajah: The Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington

Maharajah: The Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington  This is an unbelievably impressive exhibition maintaining the usual high standard of events at the V & A. India was overwhelmed by stronger neighbours, then by Western Imperialists, seeking a colony that fitted with their nostrums, that might be strategically advantageous. Even today the current war is based really on Indo-Pakistan relations representing the Islamification of east and west India (now Pakistan and Bangladesh) first brought about by the Moghuls. The Moghuls, a nation that originated in Persia but actual descendants of the Timurids, hence their homeland Moghulistan (Mongolistan). The Moghuls were essentially militaristic, even more militaristic than the native Rajputs, who seemed to have lived by a kind of Zealot ethic, preferring suicide to dishonour. They were clearly a very powerful presence until their influence waned and the British came to establish the Raj, but the words we have of 'Indian'
Read more

THE PAINTED VEIL and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

The Painted Veil (2006), dir John Curran, starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Diana Rigg and Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), dir Mike Newell, starring Javier Bardem The Painted Veil , adapted from a Somerset Maugham novel, is a moving tale of a love affair played out before the backdrop of a cholera epidemic in China sometime in the early 20th century. The film depicts the horrors of cholera, the beauty of the Chinese landscape, the trials and tribulations of Walter and Kitty Fane’s relationship. Love in the Time of Cholera , (another adaptation from the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, adapted by Ronald Harwood) shares with The Painted Veil the theme of Europeans in a non-European locale, coping, or failing to cope, with cholera. In The Painted Veil , Walter Fane (played by Edward Norton, an American actor with a high art reputation), a British medical official sent to a remote Chinese Province to help control a cholera epidemic is estranged from his wife Kitty, who has be
Read more

Notes on the films of Sam Peckinpah

Last evening I watched Pat Garret and Billy the Kid by Sam Peckinpah.   I haven't seen such a film for a very long time, dull melancholic edge tainted with sadness and elegiac to the core.   I noticed that there were many production problems, as many as 6 editors, and Peckinpah disowned the film eventually.   I think the problem with the film, however, is Bob Dylan, not the editing.   He clearly can't act, his presence is irritating and, apart from the well-known song, hardly quoted in the film, the soundtrack is underwhelming.   There were so many laudable cameos otherwise, Slim Pickens, Jason Robards, Harry Dean Stanton, and Kris Kristoffersen who pulls it off somehow as Billy but who knows what his acting is really like.   I really wished someone would shoot Dylan just to get him out of the film, instead Pickens is shot and various other worthwhile character actors. The still centre of the film is James Coburn in this, his second film for Peckinpah.   After he shoots Billy
Read more