Rehearsed reading review: Geography of Fire /La Furie et sa géographie Part One

I'd say roughly 8% of my online #brand is me grumbling at the Finborough Theatre for never bringing back Armstrong's War for a full run (yes they know, yes they'd like to, no they can't get the funding.) So in the absence of that the best I can do is check out the other Colleen Murphy plays the theatre regularly premieres in the hope that she's got another gem up her sleeve. This year's Vibrant Festival includes a rehearsed reading of another of her works to deal with war, but on a much more epic scale - in fact the three hours plus of Geography of Fire / La Furie et sa géographie that we get here is only Part One of a planned two-parter. The website blurb says the play stands alone in its own right, but I'd argue there's too many threads left hanging at the end to really call it a complete story, not least of all that the battle at the centre of the play has only just about got started by the curtain call. Specifically the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham near Quebec during the Seven Years' War.

Matthew Iliffe directs a cast of fifteen-ish (a couple of them vanished after the interval) playing over thirty roles, some of them simultaneously (at one point Alison Skilbeck is practically changing character mid-sentence.) We do get to see a lot of the opposing generals, England's seasick James Wolfe (John Sears) and de Montcalm (Matthew Gouldesbrough,) fighting for a French king he's pretty sure couldn't care less about the people of New France. But the play is largely a cacophony of the locals having had enough and forming a militia, while also trying to fit in the concerns of their daily lives. Plus animals. So many animals. Montcalm keeps getting given domestic pets as gifts for some reason, one local (Tom Lacroix) spends most of the play running around looking for a stolen sow, mice and frogs keep getting crushed underfoot, and Gethin Alderman is having way too much fun making loud seagull noises into Gouldesbrough’s ear. The stage directions also inform us that wildlife is constantly wandering onto the stage, building up the image of a fledgling community that’s barely been reclaimed from nature yet. I did wonder if Murphy actually wrote this with a way of staging all the animals in mind (puppets? projections? putting the play on in a zoo?) or if she’s the kind of playwright who likes to give a director an impossible task then run away giggling.

The locals’ stories kick off with a pair of betrothed teenagers (Madeleine Leslay and Sam Perry) whose chaste relationship has a bit of a snag in the fact that she’s already pregnant by someone else, and who spend much of their time trying to avoid the recruiting officer (Samuel Harris) who’s as likely to try and buy Ginette’s cow as he is to conscript Henri. Of the many characters who soon accumulate I thought the army washerwoman (Charlotte Wyatt) with the ambition of becoming a powder monkey (as in someone who loads ships’ cannons, not a defunct gay bar in Greenwich) was interesting and someone whose story I’d liked to have followed more (perhaps that’s something for Part Two.) Whether as a single performance or part of a longer epic I did find this to be a bit too long and could maybe do with a few characters and plotlines being trimmed out – when you’re nearly two hours in and still not at the interval it’s hard to care that much about where some missing lace has got to.

And unlike The Wooden Meadow, which you can imagine fully-staged wouldn’t be a million miles away from the rehearsed reading, this is a play on a scale so far from what’s presented here it’s hard to imagine how well it would work as a full production (it’s even possible it would work less well without the intimacy, or the fun of a makeshift performance – if you put this on the Olivier stage it probably wouldn’t look too unlike Common, which has to be a warning sign.) But in this context, although definitely too long (especially on a Sunday night when trains home are more scarce than usual) it’s an entertainingly messy evening, surprisingly funny given the subject matter.

Geography of Fire / La Furie et sa géographie Part One by Colleen Murphy was part of Vibrant 2019, which continues in repertory until the 4th of July at the Finborough Theatre.

Running time: 3 hours 15 minutes including interval.