CANDLELIGHT AND BABYLON
by Don Roberts
Directed by Jill Champion Torrence
Cast:
Alfred Anderson, Julia Cruttenden, Jean Harding, Mary Hodlin, John Holloway, Roberta Hornstein, David Lorraine, Sean Moore, Tom Pritchard, Sheila Sorley, Arthur Boyd Taylor, John Webb, Dorothy Wood, Philip Wright
THE AUTHOR
Don Roberts was a playwright, librettist and theatre director who combined his writing with a career in industry. By 1972 he had twice won the British Drama League award for best new one-act play, for The Hobby Horse and The Umbrella God, and had also written The Ragwoman of the Shambles.
He was already known at The Questors through a public reading of his play Althiem and the experimental Reflexions, but Candlelight and Babylon was his first full-length play to receive a Questors production.
THE PLAY
Candlelight and Babylon is an elusive, multi-layered fantasy which director Jill Champion Torrance described as a “bitter-sweet, but humorous comment on one man's life”. Moving freely between reality, memory and fantasy, it follows an old man through a shifting succession of people, places and identities in which relationships and generations seem to overlap.
The company variously described it as a whimsical fantasy, a fairy tale for adults and a humorous play about people, while acknowledging an underlying current of horror and menace. Rather than offering a straightforward narrative, the play presents what the cast called a “very thick layer cake of human existence”.
PRESS RESPONSE.
The critics were divided over Don Roberts's impressionistic exploration of an old man's memories, although the balance was decidedly unfavourable. N.H. in Amateur Stage found the play both confused and confusing, arguing that its shifting identities, flashbacks and symbolism obscured rather than illuminated Roberts's intention of presenting the drifting memories of an old man. M.A. in the County Times and Gazette was similarly baffled, feeling that Roberts's use of modern theatrical devices overwhelmed his evident gift for comedy. The Stage was more sympathetic, detecting something of Dylan Thomas in the work and responding to its atmosphere, memories and voices from the past, although concluding that its influences were ultimately stronger than the play itself.
Maurice Reeve in the Middlesex Chronicle, however, responded much more warmly, calling it an agreeable and enigmatic impressionistic play and praising the succession of briefly illuminated characters and scenes. There was wider agreement about the production itself. Jill Champion Torrance's direction was variously described as imaginative, dignified and uncluttered, while Julia Cruttenden, Philip Wright and particularly Tom Pritchard as Toby's harsh and hypocritical father were singled out for praise.
Thus, even critics who found Roberts's experiment unsuccessful acknowledged the skill with which the Questors company attempted to realise it.
Amateur Stage
The Middlesex Chronicle
The Stage
The Kent Messenger
The Middlesex County Times
QUESTORS ARCHIVES
CANDLELIGHT AND BABYLON