The promotional blurb for Orphans, the “Tony nominated play”, says it is set in Philadelphia in 1983, and Philip has not stepped out of the dilapidated, poorly furnished Old Row House for many years, relying on his older brother Treat to look after him. When the play opens Philip is reading books and watching TV and when he hears his brother return, he hides the books, turns off the TV and says he was hiding in the closet. It creates an impression of their relationship, but we never really understand why he hides the books and suggests a deeper intellect than he chooses to present.
The play is part Theatre of the Absurd, part thriller, and part a mind game played on the audience. However, fundamentally for it to work you have to care about at least one of the characters and the predicament they find themselves in. Despite some good performances and American accents from the three actors, by the end we could not care less whether they live or die. And as they are all Orphans, I suppose nobody else does either.
Fred Woodley Evans is the twenty-eight-year-old Philip, a reclusive, insecure and as presented simple adolescent. Chris Walley is his domineering, bullying older brother full of bravado and bullsh*t who disturbs the domestic set-up when he “kidnaps” Harold from Chicago, played by Forbes Masson. Who is this man? A successful banker carrying bearer bonds for a client? A hoodlum on the run from Chicago gangsters? An innocent man dragged off the street who takes a shine to Philip? In the second half the table is literally turned.
The intimate seventy-seat Jermyn Street studio theatre means the front row are almost in the action while just five rows back we can hardly see the action when they are seated or lying on the floor. It does not assist the drama. Equally we are told that Orphans is set in 1983 yet the references throughout seem jarringly older. Dead End Kids was a 1935 play and 1937 film. The Charge of the Light Brigade with Errol Flynn came out in 1936. John Wayne’s film Sands of Iwo Jima came out in 1949. Actor J Carroll Naish lived from 1896 to 1973. Why does Lyle Kessler the writer have these twenty-something boys reference these in the Eighties? At least The Price Is Right, which started in 1956, was still on air in the Eighties. It does not make sense.
Despite the efforts of the cast, I was left cold and disinterested in the story and would rather have seen another revival of Harold Pinter’s classic The Caretaker in this intimate setting. The similarity of the set-up with two brothers in a dilapidated building whose lives are disrupted by a mystery guest kept popping into my head as the play progressed. That play was written in 1960, and I was left wondering whether Kessler had taken inspiration from it in writing his American version, Orphans. Perhaps the programme notes, Miller’s Crossing, might have drawn this comparison and provided some insight into how the Director Al Miller saw it. He describes it as a play “with real voltage, fast, explosive, visceral, comic and tragic”, but I felt none of that. We at least felt sympathy for the old tramp Davies in The Caretaker.
