The Saxon Shore (15.3.86)

The road to Hard Knott Pass in the Lake District is the steepest in Britain: a 1 in 3 gradient with a multitude of hairpin bends makes it one of the most daunting too.  Reaching it is no light matter.  After passing along Great Langdale under Harrison Stickle, you turn up to Blea Tarn and then down to Little Langdale.  From there you follow the River Brathay to Low Teighton How.  Then you descend into Wrynose Bottom.  This low, flat and wet valley floor is surely one of the most dismal places in the country.  After a seemingly interminable while, you begin the ascent of Hard Knott Pass.  Just over the crest, guarding the entrance to this whole region is Hardknott Castle.  The Romans called it Mediobogdum.

I have often wondered what it was like to be a legionary stationed here.  Britannia was the end of the Empire for Romans.  Civilisation ended at this fort; beyond it lay barbarism.  To be posted here was the equivalent of being sent to Siberia.  Except that it was not just the relentlessly inclement weather that had to be endured, not just the loneliness of the fort's position.  As a bulwark of the whole Empire, the soldiers must have felt utterly naked to the darkness that lay beyond.  Their outpost was sustained only by the huge conjuring trick that was culture.  As the Empire crumbled at their back, and civilisation tottered, the last legionaries would have sensed that darkness enter them like fine needles of piercing rain.

David Rudkin has also wondered what it was like.  His play The Saxon Shore is an attempt to convey the sense of gathering darkness.  Being a modern, Rudkin naturally relates this to the inner darkness within us.  What begins as an interesting idea descends into spuriousness with the addition of a werewolf element.  This is further weakened by some crude parallel-pointing with the situation in Ireland.  Things are not helped by the author's inability to prune; there are many scenes which do not propel the action forward or even contrast tellingly.  Instead, naively following the Shakespearian mode, they introduce comic relief, or homely touches.

Over-driven acting only exacerbated the situation.  In an effort to render the latent animality there was much frothing at the mouth and wild howling, as well as a delivery that was presumably meant to pass for stylised but ended up just stilted.  The director Pierre Audi is to blame for this: he could at least have attempted to bind the whole together by demanding a little intelligence in the acting rather than just visceral evocations.

Perhaps the most satisfactory aspect of the whole play was the set.  The Almeida's wonderful space had been transformed into a broken and dirt-strewn land teetering on the brink of anarchy.  The incidental music from Oliver Knussen was effective too; evanescent, cold and eerie.

But the overriding impression you take away from this play is of disappointment.  Rudkin's initial premise - the irony of the newcomer Saxon aspiring to speak Latin like a true British Roman just as the Empire falls - is so overlaid by irrelevancies and theatrical hamfistedness that we lose touch with its genuine insight.  Nice idea; pity about the play.

(22.3.86)

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