How I Learned To Drive ****

Southwark Playhouse

EXCERPT: "Jack Sain's direction feels very assured: it totally refigures the play in a playful and inventive way, yet does so in a way that feels so natural that I struggle to see how the play would be done otherwise."

Summary

“I lay on my back in the dark and thought about you, Uncle Peck…” 

1969, Maryland, USA. Lil’ Bit is a precocious 17 year-old frustrated with small-town life, her juvenile friends and her overbearing family. The only person who really appreciates her is her Uncle Peck. Told through a series of driving lessons throughout her adolescence, How I Learned to Drive explores the troubled relationship between a young girl and an older man with chaotic theatricality, hilarity and heartbreak. This shattering and provocative love story delves into the darker realms of sexuality and family life. Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize winning play makes its first London revival in a stunning new production from Fools & Kings and D.E.M. Productions.

Thoughts

Paula Vogel's play feels a bit of a modern classic: I reckon it could be reinvented and made pertinent in endlessly different ways, and so will be fairly timeless. Jack Sain's direction feels very assured: it totally refigures the play in a playful and inventive way, yet does so in a way that feels so natural that I struggle to see how the play would be done otherwise. It doesn't feel gimmicky at any point, though with a different script or execution of the movements it might do. It is subtly effective having everyone's faces painted white apart from the central characters of Lil' Bit and Uncle Peck: it makes actors' real ages feel irrelevant; makes her relationships with other people seem insubstantial in comparison to her relationship to her uncle; and it allows the supporting cast to shift easily between chorus roles and various recognisable people parts. The choreography of Sain's direction feels very fluid and easy and music is often used to great effect to help make the shifts between scenes - especially between narrative moments and action - feel purposeful and marked, rather than abrupt or disjointed.

I found it tricky initially to reconcile the central actors' ages with the parts they are meant to play, and I would be fascinated to see how it would shift things if an age gap made us feel more instinctively uncomfortable about the uncle's paedophilia. I am intrigued how much the age of the actors was a directorial decision. Interestingly - and I'm sure entirely intentionally - I felt my most uncomfortable when Olivia Poulet was being fondled in the car on the uncle's lap while a younger looking girl actress was saying her lines. It is at that moment that she says that from that point on, she never really existed in her body again. The physicalisation of the point really hammers the point home, and cleverly makes a real strength of the fact that a 40 year old plays all the ages we see represented on stage, with no thought for verisimilitude. And likewise, the fact that the uncle is presented so harmlessly - and that no overt visual age difference sets off the alarm bells - makes her revelation that he's doing some sort of sordid countdown to the moment where sex with her isn't statutory rape all the more alarming - we too have been gulled into accepting the unacceptable. I do still believe watching it could have been more traumatic an experience, and would like to see how other directors make it such, but this was still a fairly powerful and definitely engaging production of an interesting and timeless play.