The Cane - Royal Court

Booked for the Sat 19th Jan matinee. It will be my first visit to the RC. Looking forward to it.

I booked for this ages ago and have had to move my ticket to January. The Royal Court box office were very amenable to making the switch, although I had to pay £10 per seat otherwise I was going to be at the back of the circle. Chap on the phone was about as monotone and low energy as a human can be, but he made it work.

It's available in the GILT offer for January. £10 in the Balcony and £20 in Stalls

Saw tonight's show, and loved it. A laser-focused, one-issue, non-naturalistic (but more realistic than Pinter) play that starts slowly, but builds by gradations into something exciting, helped enormously by Alun Armstrong's remarkable performance, that anchors the tone, and builds beautifully to a meaningful climax.

It's an hour and forty minutes without an interval, so requires precision bladder control, and any drinks purchased from Steve Hamilton at the bar should be saved for consumption half way through the show, so as to delay it's passage through the body until after the show has ended.

Some spoilers follow, limited to information you cull in the opening set-up. . .

The fact that this is a one-issue show (about violence, symbolised by the titular "Cane") will bother some, who may feel that's limiting but, for me, this singular focus is a source of the play's power.

Mark Ravenhill's writing has an building block quality, whereby one character will repeat what another character just said, and then build on it. It is at once alienatingly non-naturalistic, yet teasingly mysterious, inevitable and tantalising revelations promised by the inexorable build.

How interested you are in the central issue, the morality and consequences of bureaucratically meted-out violence, may impact your experience of the play.

In my case, I was initially a little bored about a play in which angry kids are picketing a retiring teacher's door because he used to administer the cane. I was bored because I myself was caned a couple of times, and have vivid memories of other kids also being caned, the ones who, like me, would race afterwards crying to the bathroom to plunge our hands in ice cold running water, and the ones so hard they laughed in the teachers' faces, often getting hit on the behind instead as a result, and the one legend who was SO hard he laughed at that too, and got walloped on the head with the cane, and still laughed.

So Alun Armstrong's by-the-book Edward seemed mild-mannered and reasonable, compared to my own memories, and I was thinking, so what?

But there is a weird moment, early on, where Edward's wife (Maggie Steed) reminds Edward's daughter (Nicola Walker) how she once tried to kill Edward with an axe, and from that moment on, Ravenhill ensures that no matter how slow the plot progression, we are glued to each and every character clue that the three wonderful actors dole out: what storms rage beneath each character's preternatural (and absurdly funny) calm?

Maggie Steed is tantalisingly twitchy, Nicola Walker provocatively precise, and Alun Armstrong simmers like a calm volcano. For performances alone, this is worth it, but Ravenhill pays off the set-up so well that I was eventually thrilled, and my reservations about the no-interval, one-issue slowness of it all were completely overcome.

I felt as charged as if I just had my third caning, albeit delightfully metaphorical and thankfully theatrical this time! 4 and a half stars!

Apologies for going off-topic - and thanks to Steve for the informative and intriguing review which has made me want to see this - but how many times do we have to have the interval/comfort break discussion?  And I note that the above comment appears to come from a man and probably a young one at that.

There are many reasons why people may appreciate information re running time and/or lack of interval, including for planning purposes, transport home, etc.

Also, not everyone who finds it difficult to sit for a prolonged period has a bladder problem - it could be due to another health issue or medical condition entirely.  However, to give some examples, a lot of women experience difficulty after childbirth; men may have an enlarged prostate gland; people may be on diuretic medication and so on.


Great for those to whom none of the above applies (yet!) but could we please have a little more tolerance and understanding for others?

I was in with Mr Foxa and Snciole (as it happens) on Friday and cheekily asked the young man behind the bar if he was you, Steve Hamilton.  He seemed a bit shocked and said no.  Then I grilled him if anyone behind the bar was you and he assured me you were away that evening.  So if you were hiding behind a keg you can come out now ;-)

I was glad to see this, but had a bit of a mixed reaction.  The first 20 minutes I thought I was going to love it and there were some  later bits that I did love (the discussion of the pageant, etc.) but I felt it lost its way in the end.   The set was a bit anxiety provoking - so bare the actors seemed stranded (on purpose, I'm sure, but still I was dying for someone to haul a comfy sofa on.) There was a mishap with a stage effect so a stage manager had to come out and stop the show for a bit, which did kill the momentum somewhat.   We talked about it a lot afterwards - my husband who is of the caned generation -  remembers the bullying as being much worse than the caning which at least seemed to have rules about it.  There was a lot of accuracy - we visited my husband's old grammar school in Liverpool on (coincidentally)  the day it was being shut down and a somewhat squiffy physics professor showed us the drawer of canes (different widths, I assume for different crimes) and the ledger book.  I'll be interested to hear what people think Ravenhill was saying about education - all the alternatives he presented seemed pretty ghastly.

Firstly it was so lovely to see Foxa and meet Mr Foxa. In hindsight I found the stuff about academies far more horrifying than the corporal punishment system. It was barbaric, it wasn't a deterrent but it has thankfully gone and is seen as something almost Victorian despite the fact anyone born before 1970 may have been caned before it was removed from schools in 1986.

As a play I found the relationships odd; Maggie Steed is great as the mother who always hated the cane and crucially always hated her daughter (The suggestion that Steed's character, because I don't know names sorry never practised teaching, is interesting) but the highlights are Walker and Armstrong as this father-daughter partnership who if they got on could be brutal but Walker as the unloved daughter relishes seeing her parents suffering, both professionally and personally, gives a really sinister performance.

The biggest issue is the fact that I don't think any talks of being caned in the same way they talk of sexual abuse or as Foxa said above bullying. School is just a grim place to be; are there going to plays about how awful detention is? I wasn't convinced by Ravenhill's argument that the #metoo movement is coming for these men in their 60s/70s for doing their job. Ravenhill tries to hint there is a sadomasochism element to Armstrong's relationship with his daughter and his pupils.

Finally; the set. It broke during a key reveal scene only to be another empty box (The characters get very hysterical about how full of crap the loft is and it is completely bare on stage). It wasn't helped by my awful seats in the Slips where I could often see a mirror and an audience member sleeping. I keep saying this but whilst this is good, it at times felt first draft good. I hope as the previews continue it tightens up and improves a set which doesn't reflect a script in its current form. Also I thought the broken stairs looked more like pork pies.

Surely Walker's character, representing the academies, is the just the new patriarchy with its incredibly draconian approach to teaching ("Eyes forward, silence in the corridor")? Surely generations of pupils will be coming after her?

Saw the matinee this afternoon - enjoyed it without being greatly impressed by it - I can see why there was no interval as the tension that was building slowly would have been totally wasted if there was a break for pints and pies halfway through .

To tell the truth it could have done with 10 minutes or so being cut off the running, the first 45 minutes did seem a bit of a slog to get through, and I got the impression that this was originally a lot longer (no explanation as to why the daughters belongings had been burnt (although I’m guessing the axe attack might be a good indicator 😝 and the banging at the door that no one answered and that’s just for starters).

Watching this I thought this would have been a great exploration on today’s outrage culture where people’s pasts are dug up and their actions or words they’ve said are taken out of context and splattered all over social media as morally damning

It certainly felt like that hearing about the kids protesting outside who sound like they weren’t caned or even in the school when caning was around. They were just part of a collective moral witchunt

What this play could have done with was a bit more context on who the kids were and as memtioned above how the information on the caning was dredged up in the first place. In fact Mark Ravenhill should elaborated on a couple things such as the axe scenario

So not a bad play and Alun Armstrong undoutedly gave an emotional performance. At times it felt like he regretted giving up on his daughter. It just get skimmed over that and to me that’s the main problem with the play when it came to addressing some potentially serious issues

Agree on the weird layout of the room

You weren't missing anything I think - all there was to see was the ragged ends of some of the stairs, leading to a door halfway up the wall where Alun Armstrong emerged from - presumably this was the study. And yes, how come it was a two storey house with apparently a double height living room which led to the attic.

Lots of houses have the stairs in the lounge, look at smaller houses on Zoopla. Almost every house on the housing estate I used to live on had the front door open straight into the lounge with the stairs at one side and the kitchen at the back, and the ones that didn't certainly started off that way before the owners started putting extra walls in.

You can't have literal realistic sets on stage anyway, you could fit my entire three bed house on the stage of the Royal Court and still have wiggle room to open the front door into, and it's not even a new build.

Isn’t this supposed to be allegorical (also suggested by the lack of scenic realism etc.)? A number of reviews suggest that (positive ones, although Exeunt saw it as naturalistic, strangely, yet was also as positive). How much is actually supposed to be real?