Joe Orton's 'Fred and Madge' is a juvenile work, but Rough Haired Pointer's interpretation is an org

By Eva Jackson

The two hours I spent in the company of Fred and Madge at The Hope Theatre were strong contenders for the most bizarre in living memory. They were also utterly transporting and powerfully inventive, and marked a personal milestone in my theatre-going career: the never-before-experienced phenomenon of the production outshining the play.

Rough Haired Pointer present the world premiere of Fred and Madge - Orton's forgotten first play, entirely neglected for professional performance until now. It is a bizarre melange of trademark Orton - farce, pitch-black humour, mannered yet oddly lovely prose - and an Orton who never came to pass, one who wanted to stake his claim as a leading light in the theatre of the absurd. The show opens on the shabbily appointed living quarters of Fred and Madge as they snipe and grouse at one another, the very picture of a couple who have come to hate their marriage and the dreary demands of the drudgery that binds their lives together. We meet Queenie, Madge's sister (who spikes our interest here by inexplicably being a lanky bearded man in a dress), and the girls trade curtain-twitching gossip and meaningless aphorisms. Just as we begin to wonder whether we are to be treated to two hours' worth of a bitter meditation on the working class condition and Orton's familiar preoccupation with the subreption of 'the old whore society', Webber the director strolls on stage and starts retooling the action to suit the whims of Sykes, an audience member who didn't have any trouble finding the place but does have a drinking problem. And so begins the descent from the slightly surreal to the completely ridiculous.

Nothing in the play makes much sense, and nothing is safe. Conventions of character, linear time, form, narrative structure - all are raged against, toyed with, and ceaselessly upended. It is a horrid little love story featuring an Edenic apocalypse, a play-within-a-play, and people who band together to laugh buildings to the ground. The characters are variously and inconsistently employed as water-sievers, rock-pushers, concubines, professional insulters, carpet-beaters and a Maharanee. The piece delights in the awkward as well as the absurd: pauses in conversation are left to hang horribly in the air, characters speak different lines simultaneously or leave the stage mid-action and mid-sentence with no explanation.

The programme for the evening is also a full playtext, and a readthrough of this revealed that there have been quite a few cuts made to present the version on display at the Hope Theatre. This was, I'm sure, the result of a judicious and deft editing process, but I rather think that one could have torn out pages blindfolded and ended up with much the same result. It must be stressed that this is no slight on the adaptation, more that the text is such a jumbled mess of ideas and vignettes and non-sequiturs that great swathes could be excised at almost any juncture and we would be left with the same overall impression.

Bearing in mind that the source material here is at best, I'm afraid, an acquired taste, it must now be said that what Rough Haired Pointer have done with it is no mean feat. They are not a company to rest on their laurels. The Young Visiters was their inaugural production, which debuted at the Hen and Chickens in the summer of 2013. This playful and irreverent adaptation of a novel written by precocious nine-year-old Daisy Ashford was a piece that achieved the not unpleasant effect of spending the evening in a curio cabinet, and showcased the fledging version of a dressing-up-box style that has rapidly matured into the distinct aesthetic that renders the endlessly bizarre and challenging universe of Fred and Madge. RHP's calling-card is a sort of studied ramshackle quality, a tumbledown charm. They are rough around the edges in the most knowing and sophisticated way possible, and elevate the idea of play to something of an art form.

This is helped here by the phenomenally inventive and relentlessly ingenious set design by Christopher Hone. The performance space at The Hope Theatre would challenge even an estate agent's idea of 'compact and bijoux', and yet Hone's brilliance makes a virtue of necessity and easily transforms the stage into the piece's myriad locations: a playground, a hospital, an English jungle, the Daily Mail building, and countless more besides.

These transformations wouldn't be possible, however, without the efforts of the cast, who work in well-choreographed harmony in the incredibly limited space available and exude a watchable air of easy companionship and cohesion with one another. The company of six play ten parts between them, and there are frenetic and exposed switches between roles that are managed beautifully. Geordie Wright as the aformentioned bearded Queenie is a triumph of the weird and wonderful, and Jordan Mallory-Skinner as Webber, Gladys and Jimmy gives a masterclass in understated comedy.

Mary Franklin's direction does much to bring a kind of order to the chaos, and urges the play onward when it threatens to become bogged down in itself. Creative license is cleverly deployed in a work with no sense of boundaries or limits, and a skiffle band comprised of the cast, in character, is occasionally added to enrich certain moments. The scant stage direction 'Enter the OLD MAN with a note on a tray' is expanded to a strange and beautiful little song, sung live, that elucidates Madge and the audience that her husband-to-be has left her. Fred and Madge hear 'their song' on the radio in hospital, and we get to hear it too - haunting, sad, and played on a washboard. Moments like this add a touch of much-needed depth and humanity to the work, and draw the audience back in just when they might otherwise have been pushed away for good by the madness of it all.

In the closing moments of the play, society wit and renowned professional insulter Petrie says: "Those who are content to be carefree derive the greatest enjoyment from a dream. Unfortunately there are some who are wrapped up in the details of reality, having no time, no joy, of dreaming." Rough Haired Pointer's Fred and Madge is a triumph of style and execution over content. The play isn't an unearthed masterpiece, but the production is a full-throttle and rambunctious theatrical experience - a riot of colour, characters and ideas that spill over the fourth wall and keep going. It promotes dreams over reality. It is akin to a cultural sugar-rush. After I had left the oppressive heat of the theatre and had the chance to reflect, I realised that I hadn't really learned anything. But I did have a bloody good time.

@PostScriptJour

Fred and Madge is at The Hope Theatre in Islington until 18 October.

Tickets can be purchased here.

Photo credit: Christopher Tribble

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