Gundog

Two shepherds, sisters Anna (Laura McCluskey) and Becky (Thalía Dudek) spring an intruder (Alexandros Pettas) on their isolated hard-scrabble sheep farm somewhere in the English Midlands.  He says his name is ‘Guy Tree’ and claims he was looking for scrap metal; he has a ridiculously small spanner to prove it.  In this very first scene, given the quality of the writing and the distinct performances, we learn about the landscape, the sheep and these three characters - the way they think, talk, and behave.  Anna, the elder sister, is quiet, phlegmatic but kindly; she takes each day as it comes and to all the catastrophes that ensue, she responds that it’s nobody’s fault - even when it is.  Young Becky becomes the tragic centre of the story.  Preternaturally intelligent, insightful, articulate, and funny, she nevertheless did not finish high school.  Needed on the farm.  Trapped.  But still smiling.

Simon Longman says that when he wrote the play - from first-hand experience, we gather - ‘the UK was, and still is, a mess.’  (Exacerbated now by Brexit.)  The farm depicted in his play is a near primitive holdout in a world of mechanisation and agribusiness. 

The sisters offer ‘Guy’ food and lodging in exchange for help.  He’s recessive, urban, and clumsy.  He may be an illegal immigrant.  He’s too ashamed to go home and won’t even contact his parents.  He will stay with the sisters for years and years - but do not expect romance or even sex, not in this play.  And then, as if out of nowhere,  Ben (Andy Johnston), the sisters’ hostile and useless brother, returns.  Absent for three years, barefoot, still consumed with rage and not saying where he’s been.  Nothing is Ben’s fault - even when it is.  Meanwhile, Grandad Mick (Dion Mills), with early onset dementia, can burst abruptly into any scene and tell a story they’ve all heard before.  

Longman’s play, first performed at London’s Royal Court in 2018, depicts this rural family - plus ‘Guy Tree’ - over many years, only just surviving, hand-to-mouth, going on, keeping on.   Lambs are born maimed.  Sheep get diseased and four fifths of the flock must be shot.  That drives Dad (a character never seen and not necessary to be seen) to despair and suicide.  The mother is long gone.  They miss her desperately.  Some rustling becomes necessary.  These people cannot leave.  Where would they go?  Besides, ‘Land beneath our feet.  Got all our blood inside it, hasn’t it?’  And time doesn’t stop, much as they all might yearn that it could; it goes rolling on - and here the many passing years are signalled by Harrie Hogan’s rolling lighting changes.

Set designer Freya Allen was, I guess, constrained by the inhospitable Chapel off Chapel Loft space and her budget.  As is director Alonso Pineda.  In the London production, the stage was simply covered in mud (clearly impossible here), a sheep’s carcase in the centre, and a cyclorama depicting a vast and distant horizon.  Allen’s set here must stand in for the bleak fields and the family’s home, necessitating cast bringing on and taking off bits of furniture and rolled and sometimes bloody sheepskins.  Given the play’s circular structure and its many brief scenes (some as short as two lines of dialogue), narrative momentum and emotion are constantly interrupted. 

All that said, Gundog is a powerful, moving experience. The dialogue is pointed, revealing and at times poetic without a hint of pretention. And the entire cast is excellent.  Dion Mills suggests another layer to Mick - an old man who knows he’s losing his memory.  Laura McCluskey’s seemingly stolid Anna is a fine example of restraint.  Andy Johnston makes us care about his Ben because we feel his defeated frustration.  Alexandros Pettas makes the most of his somewhat tacked on character - and Thalía Dudek is a wonderful Becky - a performer who actively listens to their interlocuter with their so expressive face and their whole body.  It’s a riveting performance.  The irrepressible - despite everything - vitality Dudek brings to the character makes Becky even more poignant.  And, despite everything again, what we see on stage is, finally, a crazy stubborn resilience and love.

Michael Brindley