Fenland Fisherman's Mythic Catch
WOMAN: “You must come and see this. It’s wonderful. It only happens once a year. Come see.”
MAN doesn’t move
Jez Butterworth’s The River is a curiously old-fashioned piece. We seem to be in a rural England near the banks of a powerful River. A Fisherman’s hut has a telephone, record player, and paperback books, but otherwise seems to have changed very little for decades. The Three Characters, who are billed as Man, Woman, Other Woman, are mostly well-mannered, articulate, and attend politely to each other’s often quite lengthy monologues. Although there are hints of an underlying brittleness to the relationships. The Women seem content to live in the present while the Man sometimes frets to make sense of his past.
But soon a sense of unease creeps in. The Woman disappears. The Man calls the police. The Other Woman returns in her place. But this is no cliched triangle. Conversation picks up as if nothing has happened. Woman returns proudly with a sea trout, which is gutted in front of us, and popped into the oven wrapped in newspaper. (The audience appear to be unmoved. And there are no chips in sight.)
So there are hints of another, possibly mystic, level of reality. Are the Women one woman who somehow divides herself? Or are both water nymphs or spirits? A copy of Ted Hughes’ River is flourished and Hughes’s later work has a well-known mythic tendency that punched holes in what we like to think is reality. Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse with its determination to see beyond the ‘normal’ is also cited.
In Butterworth’s Jerusalem “Rooster” Byron may be a flawed incarnation of a primordial pastoral deity. Or are we being teased with the possibility of allegory? Both the Women have made love to the Man, enjoyed it, and talk to him as if they are the same person. They are, it seems, interchangeable. Though perhaps only from the Man’s point of view. Or is it Nature’s? Rooster himself might have agreed.
The Woman urges the Man to take the simple step to look out of his window at something she finds uniquely beautiful that only happens once a year. He ignores her. And yet, apart from a stunning red dress, there are other differences between the Woman and the Other Woman. So is the Man really just a bit of a Devil with the old Diary? Until…
At the end of the play the Audience must make its own judgement as to where, if anywhere, these characters have arrived. The Cast deliver the rhythms and poetry of the dialogue and monologues, with perfect assurance. The set is carefully detailed but does not distract us from the sounds and silences. Just to quibble I wonder if swans do whir in flight. Jez Butterworth is probably far more of a naturalist than I am but I once sat on a Suffolk beach and heard the unforgettable rubbery smack and snap of swan wings as one flew right over my head. Perhaps it was trying to scare me.
Sadly, since The River was first staged a far uglier form of reality has caught up with it. We now find it hard to share simple pleasure in our waterways, let alone heightened mystic awareness. They have been exploited and polluted to the point that the shining shoals of fish the play celebrates may be looking for another home. And perhaps future productions of The River itself will be revived primarily for nostalgia’s sake.
Production Notes
The River
Written by Jez Butterworth
Directed by James Haddrell
Cast
Starring:
Paul McGann
Amanda Ryan
Kerri McLean
Creatives
Director: James Haddrell
Designer: Emily Bestow
Lighting Designer: Henry Slater
Composer: Michaela Murphy
Sound Designer: Julian Starr
Information
Running Time: One hour 20 minutes without an interval
Booking to 25th November 2023
Theatre:
Greenwich Theatre
Crooms Hill
Greenwich
London SE10 8ES
Phone: 020 8858 7755
Website: greenwichtheatre.org.uk
Tube/Train: Cutty Sark or Greenwich
Reviewed by Brian Clover at the
Greenwich Theatre on 4th October 2024