Adaptations - Part II

Donmar Warehouse presented Be Near Me - 'a stage version by Ian McDiarmid, from the novel by Andrew O'Hagan' - in a co-production with National Theatre of Scotland. It's the story of an Oxbridge-bred Catholic priest in his late fifties, who takes up a new post in a small Ayrshire town. His housekeeper, Mrs Poole, adores him and he in turn teaches her about the finer things in life from wine-tasting to French conversations. The community finds his quintessential, upper-middle-class, intellectual Englishness slightly alien but accepts him and his occasional eccentricity. He befriends a group of local youth in his charge and one fifteen-year-old boy, Mark, in particular. Grown up in a dysfunctional family and entrenched in bitterness and hostility (towards his parents, Muslims, and the world at large), Mark is gradually drawn in by Father Anderton's warmth and reciprocates the friendship by showing him around his secret drinking den (a delapidated pub) where they share a drink, smoke some pot and try to open up to each other. Inevitably, Mark ends up on Father Anderton's Persian rug one late night and the two of them are discovered lying hand in hand, by Mrs Poole who has lately been in a state of constant agitation because of her newly diagnosed cancer, and Father Anderton's nightmare of condemnation and - even worse - agonising process of soul-searching thus begin.

McDiarmid apparently loved the book so much that he decided to adapt it himself. The result is a true showcase for the veteran actor (his two London roles last year, in John Gabriel Borkman, also at the Donmar; and Six Characters in Search of an Author at Gielgud, couldn't have been more different but both encapsulated the essence of good acting perfectly), but it also provided ample platform for ensemble acting with breadth and depth, which I would argue was even more moving and gratifying. McDiarmid is undoutedly a consummate actor capable of running the whole emotional gamut within the space of one sentence, and my favourite moments of the play include Father Anderton's clumsy and desperate attempts to decipher text messages on what is evidently a newly acquired mobile phone, where no a single word is uttered but you can read the impending despair in the way he holds the device and stares at - into - it. Some might feel though that at times the tour-de-force performance (which is truly what it is) becomes too mannered, and we're made to feel as uncomfortable at the way he becries moral hypocrisy (those of others as well as his own) as the villagers are at his intellectual foreignness.

In comparison, the ensemble depicting the villagers, are compelling in different ways. Blythe Duff's Mrs Poole, whose transformation from the chirpiness and wittiness at the beginning of the play to her cancer-ridden, tortured and diminished self to her empassioned and dignified defence of her former employer in the extensive court scene in Act Two, is the most memorable. The two youngsters, Mark the 'victim' (Richard Madden) and his on-and-off, unruly girlfriend Lisa (Helen Mallon), convey their precocious lack of morality through every movement of teenage confusion effortlessly.

The production, directed by John Tiffany, starts with a stage all bare except for six chairs and a long table. The chairs are soon pulled downstage to the back of the wall where the actors who are not involved in the current scene sit, mostly expressionless and occasionally taking part in a startling manner (an almost mechanical, all-sat-down Ceilidh dance became more poignant by the minute). Father Anderton's gradual downfall and self-redemption are told through tableaux, each accompanied by the minimum props but to maximum effect (this has become a noble Donmar tradition, surely). The use of clever sound effects (the echos on the beach) and video (the teenagers giving evidence in court) are perceived as an organic part of the narrative rather than intrusive technical accessories. The folk songs - which I usually find arbritrary and gratuitous in such plays - are sung beautifully by the ensemble who almost metamorphoses into a Greek chorus. The excerpts and discussions of classical music always feel appropriate, including my first experience of hearing a five-minute discussion of a living composer on London stage.

In terms of the plot, everything that Father Anderton goes through, and the reaction of others to it, is quite predictable. In that sense there's no great dramatic arch here, but a journey that's almost too smooth. But to begrudge that would not do such a poetically realised production justice, and the notion that human nobility can transcend moral sins is rarely presented in a contemporary story so convincingly. Having grown up in a culture and society with little resemblance to the vast majority of materials presented in London's theatres, I always take note of evenings where those universal elements of humanity reach out to me from the stage despite a storyline which I have no personal connection with, and this was one of them.