Written for Culture Wars
As in Edgar and Annabel, no-one’s saying what they really mean in DC Moore’s The Swan, a raucous elegy to an ingrained British decorum. Initially, it’s a product of inarticulacy. The same swear words serve a multitude of purposes and sentences peeter out half-way, the speaker unable to find the right word. (“You look a bit…”) Yet as preparations for a wake roll on, the lack of words, the secrets kept, the feelings bottled up, start to take on a surprising dignity. As the middle-class Mr Downing, perched at the bar with his crossword, commands: “Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man.”
The Swan is a worn-out, run-down, unmanned pub in London’s East End. On it’s tables are the debris of the night before, crumbled crisp packets and sticky glasses, and the provisions for a forthcoming wake: tupperware, finger food and fizzy drinks. Jim [Trevor Cooper] has avoided his son Michael’s funeral. What seems at first a cowardly act is gradually mitigated by Moore’s perfectly managed drip, drip of information.
He’s soon joined by his granddaughter Denise, who has herself left halfway through, much to the fury of her mother Christine, turning up afterwards and vilifying Jim. Yet, as Michael’s true character becomes clear – he was a serial womaniser, whose death came en route to his long-term mistress – Jim’s willingness to accept her anger seems self-sacrificial and protective.
Moore has a wicked way with snappy lines, which will catch the immediate attention. Clare-Louise Cordwell’s Amy, brassy, brash and high on “one too many skittles,” is a scattergun of snap retorts. But there is an underlying delicacy to Moore’s writing; he layers up ideas of quiet dignity to suggest that class is in dignity not economic standing. He does so with real subtlety. Mr Downing, known to locals as Downton Abbey, twice warns Denise of fluff on her jumper: “It should be on the inside, love, where it functions best.”
It’s left to a biblical quotation to eventually hammer home the point, with Denise reciting Corinthians 4:16: “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day…Look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.”
While Moore’s skilful construction of this central theme is impressive and intelligent, the pleasure of The Swan is its story and its characters. At this level, he displays real empathy and real humour, never patronising his characters despite their cartoonish quality.
Trevor Cooper holds the stage magnificently, coupling no-nonsense joking with an inner-strength and there’s real delicacy from Pippa Bennett-Warner as Denise, who moves from soft fledgling to solid adult. Sharon Duncan-Brewster is sharply forthright in her remonstrations and there’s brilliant comic support from Nitin Kundra as the dopey, vomit-stained Bradwell and Cordwell as his demanding wag, whose looseness of tongue (and elsewhere) sparks the revelations about Michael.
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