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A Womanly Start to a New Year

If 1999 carries on the way it has started, theyear willbe a tough one theatrically for the male of the species. Five of themturn up in the first two plays of the season, Liz Lochhead’s ‘‘Perfect Days’’ (Hampstead) and Shelagh Stephenson’s ‘‘The Memory of Water’’ (Vaudeville), and all are an utter waste of space.

In that sense, I guess both new productions are of ‘‘women’s plays,’’ but intriguingly neither is any kind of feminist tract. Both plays are written within well-defined comic guidelines, both are traditionally well-made and both are clearly destined for some kind of afterlife on television, which is where either could have started as something betweena serial drama and a sitcom.

Most Edinburgh Festival hits make the long trek south over several months and end up looking distinctly hung overand often very fragile in the colder light of a London winter, but the wonder of ‘‘Perfect Days’’ is that it is every bit as good as we were told it was from Scotland last August.

In an elegant Glasgow loft lives Barbs, (the feisty and fiery Siobhan Redmond in what will clearly be one of the performances of the year), who has her own daytime television slot and a highly successful hairdressing salon. What she does not have is a baby, and, approaching 40, she decides this has to be sorted out.A former husband of remarkabletolerance, a gay boyfriend, a college-age lover and a mother from hell are soon on the scene to aid and abet her quest for motherhood in Lochhead’svital, funny and charming comedy.

No, ‘‘Perfect Days’’ is not perfect, but in John Tiffany’s production, what saves it from being a dire morality play is Lochhead’s evident enjoyment of her characters and their various social and sexual predicaments.

The other ‘‘new’’ play of the week dates still further back, to July 1996, and also features a mother from hell, in this case dead, but omnipresent. This onecomes from Hampstead, where Shelagh Stephenson’s first script, the patchily brilliant ‘‘The Memory of Water,’’ was first seen in a production by Terry Johnson. Two and a halfyears later, after a long regional tour, a new production comes into the Vaudeville, again directed by Johnson but with an all new cast, starring Alison Steadman, Samantha Bond and Julia Sawalha.

They arethree sisters gathered at their old family home on the Northeast coast of England to bury their cantankerous mother (Margot Leicester), who reappears periodically from beyond her shiny new coffin to make all their lives still more troublesome.

‘‘The Memory of Water’’ is no ‘‘Blithe Spirit,’’ but it is an intriguing throwback to all those plays of the early 1950s by Wynyard Browne and N.C. Hunter,in which at some kind of family reunion skeletons would tumble from every closet.Sure enough, these three sisters, all of whose lives have gone horribly adrift, turn out to have been bruised beyond belief by a maternal upbringing somewhere between Alan Bennett and Joe Orton, and the genius ofJohnson’s production is the way thatit ends up in bleak, black humor, drowning in its various admissions of familial guilt and relative failure.

The Royal Shakespeare Company, meanwhile, after two years of what seems to be some kind of artistic breakdown, hascome into town totheBarbican with two productions, looking very sharp indeed, while out at Stratford on the home stage a new ‘‘Winter’s Tale’’ is also triumphantly hailed.

The Philip Voss‘‘Merchant of Venice’’ has a sinewy strength and speed, while also on the main Barbican stage Adrian Noble’s ‘‘The Tempest’’has a powerfully unusual Prospero in David Calder, who philosophically drives this staging through to new discoveries and map readings of an island that has always been as sinister in its magic as the Never-Never Land of ‘‘Peter Pan.’’

There are also two strongly comic turns from Barry Stanton (Stephano) and Adrian Schiller (Trinculo) in two of the unfunniest jester roles ever written even by Shakespeare.

Nobody has ever doubted Noble’s talent as a director; the question is whether he is also the producer who can pull the RSC back into some kind ofshape before it fragments entirely into individual productions on a wide variety of London and regional stages.

These two Barbican transfers indicate that there is still a problem with talent in the middle and lower ranks of the company, and still another with verse-speaking (and even sometimes understanding); but they are the most encouraging start to a new year that the RSC has had in a very long time.

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