Brave production of Coward classic

THEATRE

CAVALCADE Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Until December 18 "DON'T chastise me," Noel Coward said towards the twilight of his illustrious career. "I wrote Cavalcade." And how marvellously typical of Glasgow's ever-maverick Citizens Theatre to mount such a big production at a time when most other companies are crying poverty.

Beginning on New Year's Eve 1899 and ending, with a sardonic eye on the future, on the same day in 1930, this is essentially a whistle- stop tour of three decades of epochal events seen largely through the eyes of the gentile Maryot family.

The counterpoint to this is the equally volatile fate of the Maryots' former servants, the Bridges. Death is the main protagonist down the ages in Philip Prowse's surprisingly downbeat, unsentimental production. Whether in the Boer and First World Wars, on The Titanic's ill-fated maiden voyage or in less dramatic ways such as heart attack or old age, death is the only certainty in an age which is as much in flux as our own.

Forever on the brink of something great, both the Bridges and the Maryots are thwarted in their search for happiness in a cruel world. Especially now, at the fag end of the century, there's something heartbreaking about watching a couple vow eternal love on the deck of The Titanic, or the massed celebratory singing of Land Of Hope And Glory as a mother grieves for her son, felled by the Great War.

Yet behind Coward's philanthropy may have been a more personal conceit. Coward too began life in 1899 - this month is the centenary of his birth - and here he marks up what may have been little more than a living scrapbook made in his own image.

Coward was accused of jingoism on Cavalcade's first outing, but here we can only see the futility of flag-waving. It's a critical, finger-pointing production that, on the brink of the 1930s, leaves you wanting to know what happened next, but also saddened by our own knowledge - especially after the stunning finale of Michelle Gomez singing a bitter Twentieth Century Blues.

"Time changes many things," says one character. But not always by much.

Neil Cooper

Copyright 1999
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