Longitude

by Arnold Wesker

Greenwich Theatre, London

Crooms Hill, Greenwich, London SE10

Call +44 0208 858 7755 Tickets £16 -£18

Mon – Sat 8pm

Wed & Sat Mats 2:30pm

Running time 2 hours with intermission

Through October 29, 2005

Considering Galileo’s fate, Yorkshire carpenter/clockmaker John Harrison was lucky. His heresy was to insist that the answer to the Longitude problem lay, not with the celestial bodies in the sky, but with a timepiece, made according to the mechanical laws of heat, balance and springs. In this he had to contend with the early18th Century English resentment, self interest, and class prejudice of the Astronomer Royal, the President of the Royal Society and his co Board members judging his invention, a Longitude watch. Patronising contempt and prevarication became the torture employed by them, and by withholding his reward, worth a million pounds in today’s money, they did wring every last ounce of fight out of Harrison before he himself called King George III (he of ‘The Madness’) into action. A very English story, filled with dramatic potential.

For the world premiere of his new play, ‘Longitude’, Arnold Wesker has appropriately chosen the Greenwich Theatre. Harrison’s famous chronometers now lie in the Greenwich observatory, constructed to solve the problem of Longitude through astronomy. Based on the bestselling book by Dava Sobel, this absorbing story of the inventor and his obsession is presented in a strangely dry, reverential production by director Fiona Laird. Given the playwright’s brilliance with confrontation and dialogue, watching characters repeatedly standing making speeches, as if to a University audience, was disappointing and tiresome.

Carrying the production virtually single handed, the splendid Anthony O’Donnell places his John Harrison firmly in the time and place. His work has the ring of truth about it, and the play bursts into life spasmodically in his set piece confrontations with his judges.

On a sparse, ship’s deck set by designer, Anthony Lamble, complete with revolving wooden floor, we actually watch the set turn full circle three times. This clunking symbolism, for the less fortunate, is spoon fed the audience to indicate the passage of three days that pass. Perhaps accidentally, it echoes the circular nature of the argument.

The chorus of sailors/townsfolk, rooted as masts in their mournfully sung contributions, were not, until the absolutely final moment in the play allowed to produce the thrilling chords that John Harrison himself invented for them, in spite of his periodically whipping them up with ‘Sing, weavers, sing!’. Would that they had.

Recommended

Saul Reichlin

Chicago Stage Talk Radio Show

October 22, 2005