Country Music (Theatre)

Country Music

(Synopsis & Reviews)

Synopsis:

Country Music tells a story of crime and redemption. Starting at the mouth of the River Thames and moving across England over twenty years. It begins with a life choice for Jamie Carris and ends with a re-union with his young daughter. It is also a story about a killer. Aspects of County Music have been inspired by interviews with current serving inmates. Written by Simon Stephens and directed by Gordon Anderson.

Critics’ Reviews: (#1)

Simon Stephens‘ marvellous and moving new play lasts for little more than an hour but feels like an epic. Its cunningly constructed narrative, spanning more than 20 years and covering the length of England from Gravesend to Sunderland , is spare but eloquent, demanding that the audience uses its own imagination to fill in the gaps.

The action begins in a car at two in the morning. Jamie, 18, has just picked up Lynsey, 15, from the children’s home where she lives. He is a former inmate himself, and once tried to hang himself, following abuse.

The pair are on the run, with half-baked plans of starting a new life in Southend. But there’s a problem: just before setting off, Jamie bottled a man in a pub and then stabbed the assistant in an off-licence.

The next scene is set 11 years later, in 1994. Jamie is now banged up in prison, after an earlier spell in borstal, this time for murder. He is being visited by his half-brother, Matty, who tells him that Lynsey has moved north with another man, and taken Jamie’s daughter with her. In the third scene, set in 2004, Jamie is in a B&B in Sunderland , meeting his now 17-year-old daughter for the first time in 14 years. A coda takes us back to 1983, and reveals the starting point of all Jamie’s troubles.

Stephens has run writing courses in several prisons and young offenders’ institutions, and clearly knows the penal territory well. But it is the imaginative sympathy of Country Music that really blew me away.

The awkwardness between the two brothers is caught in all its inarticulate pain, but the dramatist tops even this in the scene in which Jamie meets his daughter. She is scared by the intensity of his memories and the tenderness of his feelings for her; he cannot believe that she remembers so little of him and that he is so peripheral to her life. The play opens up a world of pain, and one man’s desperate need for forgiveness and redemption.

Director Gordon Anderson does the play proud with the help of a cast who uncover its emotional depth and its subtly signalled back-story. Soutra Gilmour‘s design – a semi-abstract panorama of British countryside – and Julian Swales‘ atmospheric score add to the success of the evening, but it is the performances that really make the piece glow. Lee Ross may be too old successfully to capture a hyped-up 18-year-old, but, in subsequent scenes, he captures Jamie’s turbulent emotions with a restraint and precision that is at times almost unbearably moving. There are fleeting glimpses of the simmering internal violence that has wrecked his life, sudden moments of aching tenderness suggesting the price of all he has lost.

Sally Hawkins is superb, too, as the 15-year-old Lynsey, capturing the toughness and the vulnerability of a child in care. Calum Callaghan beautifully signals the misery of Matty’s wretched home life, while Laura Elphinstone plays Jamie’s daughter with an edgy, pent-up tension that leads her into unwitting but devastating, cruelty.

I was puzzled by the play’s title, until I read an interview with Stephens where he said he wanted to offer the theatrical equivalent of the intense emotions of great American country music. And in its hauntingly desolate way, his drama can indeed stand comparison with the best and the darkest of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash.    ~ Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph 30/6/04

Critics’ Reviews: (#2)

Simon Stephens has done time – not as a prisoner himself, but as a dramatist who has worked with prisoners. The insights he has gleaned enrich his short but intricately woven new play, “Country Music.”

The piece spotlights four fateful moments in the life of Jamie Carris, an engaging but violent south Londoner. The play unfolds in a series of tightly focused two-handers, set before, during and after the prison sentences he has served for glassing one man and for killing another. The play then loops back to the illusory promise of the day prior to the events it has dramatised.

The proceedings begin in 1983. The 18-year-old Jamie (splendidly played at every stage of his development by Lee Ross) has just stolen a Ford Cortina and is elated at the prospect of driving Lynsey (Sally Hawkins), a 15-year-old truant from a residential home, to Southend.

The play operates on a principle of artfully withheld information. For example, we learn here that Jamie has glassed a person called Gary Noolan, but it’s not until the final scene, which backtracks to an earlier session with Lynsey, that we discover the sordid, mother-related reason for this violence. As in life, the momentous is not announced by thunderous chords. It’s a key factor in Jamie’s relationship with Lynsey that she found him hanging in the home after a failed suicide; it’s characteristic of Stephens’s policy of darting suggestiveness that the incident is first referred to in a quick, stinging taunt.

The two middle scenes are the most wrenching. In one, Jamie is visited in the fifth year of his sentence by his stepbrother, Matty (Calum Callaghan), who has to break the desolate news that his wife and child have moved away with another man. In the second, set after his release in 2004, Jamie confronts the 17-year-old daughter, Emma (Laura Elphinstone), whom he has not seen since she was a toddler.

Stephens does not sentimentalise his protagonist. You get a painful sense of the way that he has damaged these lives – and yet, as you watch Ross’ smile of delight at his new-found child slowly replaced by choking desperation when he realises that lost time cannot be redeemed, you ache with pity for him. You also realise that even his better instincts have rebounded on him. The estrangement from his family began, for example, because of a decent paternal impulse. He did not like to see his four-year-old daughter body-searched by the prison guards. He put a stop to her visits to spare her that ordeal.

Elphinstone beautifully conveys the apprehension of the daughter – the kindly caution of a girl who refuses to be swept into intimacy with a man who is now a stranger to her. “I’ve wanted to see you every day. All the time,” declares the distraught Jamie. To which Emma makes the impeccably fair, bleak and unanswerable response: “That isn’t my fault.”    ~ Paul Taylor, The Independent 2/7/04

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