Theatre

Theatre is dead, declares David Hare’s antagonist, media-savvy Dominic, in Amy’s View. According to the ambitious Dominic, the slick, fast-moving, action-filled medium of television represents the cutting edge and every week he flushes art down the toilet on his TV show to prove it.

Obviously, Hare doesn’t share this view. It’s a bold move to have Dominic state that theatre is slow, boring and irrelevant to the younger generation when the play itself is long and wordy, spins out the four acts with extended two-handers, has few changes of scenery and almost no action, apart from the repairing of a puncture and a startling finale.

There is no pandering to sensationalism in 'Amy’s View'. Spanning the period from 1979 to 1995, Hare’s play may, at one level, be a saga of complex family relationships, but pivotal events such as weddings, births, affairs and deaths – the stuff that TV equivalents are made of – are merely referred to.

However, even soap operas – especially soap operas – can tell a good story. Bite-sized they may be compared to Hare’s two-hour-plus exposition on life, love, art, the theatre, writing, celebrity, ageing, dependency, mothers and daughters, the establishment, snobbery, suburbia – oh, and the Lloyds Names scandal of the early 1990s – but they do have narrative drive.

Shan Braund as Esme.

David Hare is a passionate, political and frequently polemical playwright, and when he’s going all out on a cause it can make blistering theatre. I saw 'The Permanent Way', his play about the railways, when it premiered at York Theatre Royal in November 2003 and was blown away by it. However, in the domestic context it’s less successful: all too often it was the playwright’s voice I heard, rather than the characters’, whether in the self-conscious dialogue about critics or the jibes at ‘heritage England’.

The refrain in 'Amy’s View' is that ‘there are no good parts for women’; something that Hare is at pains to try and counter. The starring role in this production by York’s Settlement Players is not, though, the title role. Stoical Amy (Christina Nobbs), the daughter who hero-worships the gifted Dominic, gets to argue a lot but it’s her mother, Esme, the actress past her prime (played by former Lord Mayor of York, Shan Braund) that the play centres on.

Braund, who follows in the footsteps of Judi Dench and Felicity Kendal, portrays the eccentric luvvie with panache. She doesn’t shy away from the character’s annoying traits. Her feyness about her admirer Frank (Hugh Dower) and the Lloyds’ business might make you want to scream but by the final act, the giddiness has gone. Esme has been forced to grow up and, standing there in her white shift, her painfully acquired wisdom is humbling.

Andy Curry as Dominic.

Each of the main characters in 'Amy’s View' undergoes considerable change, which is one of the rewarding aspects of the play, and of all of them, Dominic (an intense Andy Curry) travels the furthest. Curry, alternately tortured and arrogant, was excellent, but my favourite character was Evelyn, the aged mother-in-law (wonderful Barbara Miller). She may have had the least to say but she delivered what lines she did have with deft comic timing, while her descent into dementia was as acutely observed as it was distressing.

Is the theatre still relevant, then? Of course it is. But Hare shouldn’t be so quick to pour scorn on TV hospital dramas. 'ER' tackles the same themes as 'Amy’s View' – reality, love, grief and loss – every week, albeit with more gore and the odd hostage-taking, and it frequently has me crying into a cushion.

Does it matter how you get there? Perhaps, ultimately, it is the message, not the medium, that’s more important.

Kate Lock