Review: Lotty's War, Brunton Theatre

Published on Thursday 4 March 2010 09:05

Lotty's War ** Brunton Theatre

FAILING to fully illuminate its subject or engage the audience, there were still things to admire in Giddy Ox's examination of conflict and conscience. Although not totally successful, it still asked many interesting questions about the distance between simple human feeling and collaboration during time of war and how much someone should sacrifice for love.

Set on Guernsey during the occupation, the story tells of Lotty, a 17-year-old girl who finds herself co-opted into being the housekeeper to a German General when he commandeers her house. At the centre of the tale is the bond of trust and eventual love that develops between the two enemies and the journey it takes them on. Unfortunately, neither in the performances nor the dialogue, was the audience wholly convinced of their affair.

This was a short play with a lot to fit in. The occupation took place from 1940 until the end of the Second World War, but one of the main shortcomings of the production was a failure either in design or character development to give the illusion of time passing. The result was that five years' occupation appeared to have gone by in five days.

The performances were adequate but no more than that. Katie Howell, who played Lotty, was unable to truly breathe life into a character who should have been a study in blossoming sexuality and conscience. She was crushed beneath the weight of dialogue, which was never more than a series of declamatory speeches, and so the audience never saw the developing woman underneath.

Mat Rutlin, who was Ben – Lotty's passed over and angry boyfriend – also had to struggle with lines which sounded as if they'd been written for a soapbox rather than a stage and although he put as much effort in as he could, he was unable to get away from his character appearing like a truculent toddler who had been sent to bed.

Only Martyn Stanbridge's Rolf, the charming, human, but ultimately morally-compromised German, was allowed to speak words which felt like normal conversation. It was clear that the writer, Guiliano Crispini, had been as easily seduced by this complex character, as Lotty herself eventually was.

The love triangle – which might have been interesting – was never fully explored, and Lotty's maturity, instead of developing over the course of the play, appeared to spring up overnight. Ben, who should have gone through significant changes of his own as a partisan hiding out from the Germans, seemed frozen for five years in adolescence and again only Rolf's transition was explored.

There was a kernel of a good idea locked inside this play but in the end, neither the writing nor the cast were able to bring it to life. Whilst Giddy Ox deserve to be praised for tackling a subject often forgotten by the history books and attempting to bring it down to a human level, on this occasion, they failed to match ambition to delivery.