OUR VERDICT
Adapting The Night Watch for the stage is an ambitious move. Sarah Waters’ chunky novel follows no fewer than five central characters, spans a period of six years and takes prisons, bomb raids, suicides and love triangles in its stride...
Oh, and it’s told backwards.
That’s right, backwards. The story starts in 1947 and ends in 1941, told in three chunks that each draw us further and further back in time. In the first act we’re introduced to a group of drab, miserable 30-somethings, slogging out their lives in dreary post-war London.
There’s Kay, trapped in a seedy boarding house and tormented by memories of a lost love. There’s Helen and Julia, whose once loving relationship has gone irrevocably sour.
There’s Duncan, an ex-prisoner who shares a house with an ageing Christian Scientist, and Viv, his sister, who hopes to right a wartime wrong. In the second act, we piece together the web of betrayals, loves and losses that devastated this little group.
It’s a brilliant storytelling device, a tragedy told backwards complete with a delightfully bittersweet ‘happy ending’. But it’s also a challenge to any script-writer who doesn’t want an uninitiated audience to be left scratching their heads in time-hopping confusion.
Luckily, the writer was assisted by a talented cast who were more than capable of selling the tricksy storyline.
Phoebe Pryce was entirely convincing as Kay, the emotional heart of the story. In the first act she was haunted and lost – a shell of the capable, affectionate and purposeful woman she became in the second act.
Isabella Urbanowicz was seductive as femme fatale Julia, while Sam Jenkins-Shaw and Malcolm James as Fraser and Mr Mundy shone in roles that could have been rather forgettable.
The set was also nicely evocative – fairly sparse and banked with piles of rubble, drowning in fog and murky light. In one particularly effective sequence, the beginning of an air raid was signaled by a curtain of dust which dropped from the ceiling and billowed across the stage.
But sadly, despite all these touches, I’m not convinced that this adaptation entirely met the challenge posed by its source material.
In the attempt to prune the story for the stage, I fear some of its heart got lost. Viv’s story was cut so brutally that it was difficult to see why it was included at all.
Some of the grimier aspects of the story were skirted over, making this adaptation feel oddly bloodless – in particular, we don’t see much of the gruesome reality of Kay’s ambulance rounds.
Some of the passion, the gore and the life of the source material is missng, and with so many characters on stage at any one time, it’s hard to emotionally invest in any one of the narratives unfurling before us.
That’s not to say, though, that The Night Watch isn’t worth seeing, – it’s an engrossing night out, and its exploration of same-sex relationships and women at war feels fresh. But while the play might be fun, in this case, the book is certainly better.
Venue: Richmond Theatre (book here)
Dates: Until 9 November
