David Spencer

Date: 09/05/1990
Author: James Christopher

David Spencer’s award winning play, full of tense, inarticulate aggression, examines the corrosive legacy of sexual abuse as seen through the eyes of a young playwright, Danny, whose almost perverse determination to exhume his working-class family’s murky past rubs abrasively against their wishes. If the main dynamic is Danny’s quest for the root of his father Sam’s shadowy, drink- twisted guilt – namely Sam’s interference with his sister Shelagh (Sally Rogers) – it is deliberately obscured by what Danny thinks happened (the content of his play), what he has been told happened, what he remembers happening and what he
imagines to have happened.

The action shuttles between the ’70′s and the present day on Tom Conway’s
cluttered set; street lamps, dustbins and the expedient post-pub trappings of
armchair and TV evoke on the one hand council-estate familiarity and suggest on
the other the emotional and circumstantial impoverishment of the protagonists’
lives. It’s a surreal arena dominated by Henry Stamper’s ebullient Dubliner,
Sam, whose genuine, unaffected affection for Young Danny (Dominic Kinnaird) and
the older, wiser version (Sean Bean) is strongly contrasted to the harsh
intensity Danny employs to nail his father to the past to punish him almost in
order to forgive him. It’s the arrogance of a playwright and the festering hurt
of wronged youth, but crucially, the recognition on Danny’s part that he is
vulnerable to the same sin. In all, a demanding, complex work which Sue
Dunderdale directs with respect and sensitivity, exacting powerful performances
from the Soho Theatre Company.

Royal National Theater Studio Production.

Date:09/26/1988
Author: Julia Pascal

Grown up boys

David Spencer’s new play, Space. is a poignant domestic drama set in a Halifax housing estate. Using an almost televisual linear narrative Spencer charts the relationship between Dean, a baker, and Pam, an unmarried mother and barmaid.

Through short scenes the playwright builds up the tensions of their affair and, superficially the play works well as an exploration of violence, emotional disappointment and the limitations of conventional married love.

But on a deeper level Spencer hints at the problems men have in reaching maturity and, as such, this is a brave work delying into a territory which is rarely explored by male playwights. Although Dean wants to marry Pam and legitimise their new baby, the only person he can really connect with is Pam’s son Kenny. Spencer shows young man and young boy jointly sharing the joys of physics and astronomy. Space is full of longing for the brightness of a child’s imagination and here Spencer hints that 19th century Romanticism is still vibrating from the hills surrounding the northern housing estate.

Juxtaposed against this world of poetic imagination is the violence expected from “real men”. Pam’s previous lover Mike is symbolic of this English machismo and, Spencer suggests, it is a world with which women have learnt to collude. He also makes it clear that in late 20th century Britain, imagination is a forbidden territory for women. If men want romantic love and babies, it is still women like Pam who have to take responsability.

There is an exciting mixture of poetry and harsh realism thoughout the writing and Spencer implies that we all carry the burden of our childhood histories into the sacred area of adult relationsships.

Pam expects every man to brutalise her as her father and lover did. Dean wants the comfort of a women who is more mother than equal partner.

There are strong performances from Paul Wyett as Dean and Elizabeth Rider as Pam, with equally good work from Douglas Seymour and Maggie Jones.

On Stage:

• Soho Poly Theater
• Soho Poly production
• Dublin Theater Festival Sept. 1987
• Birmingham School of Speech and Drama Sept. 1995

(c) by Staatstheater Darmstadt 2010

(c) by Staatstheater Darmstadt 2010

(c) by Staatstheater Darmstadt 2010

Press and Reviews:

• Rhein-Main-Zeitung
• The Guardian

On Stage:

• Royal National Theater Cottesloe
• Soho Poly Theater, September 1988
• New Dramatists New York, October 1988
• Barracke Deutsches Theater, October1994
• Staatstheater Darmstadt, May 2010

Languages:

• English
• German

Space, Raum, das ist nicht nur der Weltraum mit den weit entfernten Galaxien und den unzähligen Sternen, zu denen man sich hinträumen kann und von denen Dean dem kleinen Kenny jeden Abend vorm Einschlafen erzählt. Damit ist auch die beengte Wohnung gemeint, in der Kenny mit seiner Mutter Pam und jetzt eben auch Dean wohnt.
Raum (Space) ist eine Geschichte um die Frage, wie viel Platz man um sich herum braucht, für die eigenen Pläne und Träume, und wie viel man davon teilen kann. Dean und Pam meistern ihr Leben zwischen Erwachsen-Werden und familiärer Verantwortung. David Spencer legt auf anrührende Art den Fokus auf die Psychologie der Figuren und beschreibt meisterhaft den täglichen Kampf zwischen deren Ängsten und Sehnsüchten.

Die Fotos sind vom Modell des Bühnenbildes wie es durch das Staatstheater Darmstadt entworfen wurde. Die Urheberrechte für die Fotos liegen beim Staatstheater Darmstadt.

Presse und Rezension:

• Rhein-Main-Zeitung
• The Guardian

Aufführungen:

• Royal National Theater Cottesloe
• Soho Poly Theater, September 1988
• New Dramatists New York, October 1988
• Barracke Deutsches Theater, October1994
• Staatstheater Darmstadt, May 2010

Sprachen:

• Englisch
• Deutsch