Redlands
Charlotte Jones
Chichester Festival Theatre
Star rating 4
Photograph by Ikin Yum
Charlotte Jones’s beautifully written new play takes as its central lynch pin the drugs raid at Keith Richards’s West Wittering home in 1967. The trial took place in Chichester so there’s plenty of local interest to make the audience chuckle. This is not, however, a play about the Rolling Stones as such. Rather it’s a reflection on the importance of being allowed to find yourself when you’re young. Thus Jones splices together the experience of young Nigel Havers (Louis Landau – nice performance) whose father Michael Havers was defence lawyer on the case, with that of Jaggers and Richards. All are rejecting what the older people around them want in order to plough a new and original furrow of their own. As Landau says at the beginning of the play. “One day I’m going to be a famous actor but at the moment I’m still at school.” Jagger and Richards are sticking two fingers up at the old guard through everything they say and do, and especially through their sexually provocative music of which we see a fair bit. And it causes authoritarian, maybe jealous, resentment in, for example, the police who conduct the raid which was probably a set up by a News of the World journalist.
As Jagger, Jasper Talbot gets exactly the right insouciant, adpoted “mockney” manner and his body work during the music interludes is finely observed. Good casting too because he actually looks like Jagger. Brenock O’Connor has clearly studied Keith Richards’s work very closely too because he’s richly, rudely convincing. I wonder how long he had to practise that Chuck Berry duck walk? Meawhile Emer McDaid gives us a multi-dimensional take on Marianne Faithfull who was Jagger’s girlfriend at the time of the raid. Here she is flirty, of course, but she’s also vulnerable.
Anthony Calf nails a suitably patrician, lawyerly manner for Michael Havers although the play builds in scope to develop and soften it gradually. Eventually there’s a rather moving reconciliation scene with his son and a very funny one when, once they’re freed, he invites Jagger and Richards to the Garrick Club which I gather actually happened in real life because Havers genuinely came to like them. Theatrically it’s a quite neat comedy of manners, enhanced by excellent work from Clive Francis as Michael Havers’s father, a retired judge famous for presiding over the Ruth Ellis case. All the Havers clan are lawyers except Nigel and his very decent mother Carol (Olivia Poulet). There are lots of minor roles in this play which uses an accomplished cast of seventeen many of whom have to do some nifty doubling or trebling.
Redlands is a vibrant piece of theatre with high powered, ramped up music provided by a seven piece, often on-stage, band led from keys by Alan Berry. And Joanna Scotcher’s effective set puts the word “Redlands”, writ large in neon lights, round the back wall so that we can be one minute in a concert hall with revolve, or downstage in a domestic setting the next.
Director Justin Audibert makes imaginative and inclusive use of the space too with two satellite mini stages in front of the main playing space and, inclusively, there are several occasions when actors are in the heart of the audience.
