Stage Reviews
The following reviews are of the 1985 Offstage London production of Present Continuous.
THE TIMES
Irving Wardle
Awakening simultaneous echoes of Madame Butterfly and Educating Rita, Sonja Lyndon's play tells the tale of a young English teacher who conducts a feminist experiment in Japan.
The programme carries an article by Polly Toynbee itemizing the burdensome restrictions imposed on Japanese wives, and the play's opening scenes come over as a continuation of The Guardian women's page by other means. Jane, the teacher, is outraged by the marital servitude of her landlady, and starts giving her English lessons which consist largely of exhortations to rebel against her autocratic husband and the dragonish mother-in-law who grimly chaperones her whenever she goes shopping.
Setsuko, the wife, is vastly attracted by these views; but she is not strong enough to defy the family alone. So, when Jane tires of village life and moves to Tokyo, Setsuko follows her in a degrading pilgrimage, and finally commits suicide, rejected by city and village alike.
By the end, feminism has failed with a vengance. But Miss Lyndon grades its stages of failure with great care; and within a form that is almost Japanese in its ceremonial modesty. Instead of naturalistic confrontation, the action consists mainly of letters and diaries; and, best of all, the lessons, where examples of the present continuous, or the future perfect, are drawn from the frustrations of Setsuko's life and what she might make of it. After a lesson on idiomatic phrases, we find her worrying about upsetting the domestic apple cart and not wanting to cast a spanner into her teacher's works.
I think Miss Lyndon is mistaken to have used jealousy (when jane acquires a new friend) as a mainspring of the plot. But the real weakness of Penny Casdagli's production is in presenting pupil (Sayo Inaba) and teacher (Carol Leader) respectively as embodiments of helpless pathos and bumptious insensitivity. For one thing, this prevents the intended friendship from developing between them. For another, Miss leader projects such an image of a polytechnic activist bending the rice-paper walls with her torrents of self-righteous indignation that there is nowhere for the play to go.
More tactfully performed, it would come as an electrifying shock to hear her finally rejecting Japan for the Brazilian Indians as more deserving her attention: jack-booted sociology taking over from colonial despoilation. Played as it is here, the natives would take one look and vanish into the rain forest. Zienia Merton contributes a calmly eloquent performance as the acceptable face of Japanese womanhood.
THE GUARDIAN
Nicholas de Jongh
Sonja Lyndon's Present Continuous stages a fatal collision between Jane, an insensitive but well-meaning English feminist, and a simple Japanese woman in whom she tries to inculcate notions of independence and female self-esteem.
The play does not attack feminism, but condemns the kind of failure of perception which occurs when West embraces East. It makes its point with beautiful, oblique subtleness and enables you to glimpse the profound ceremonies of Japanese life, and the isolation it imposes upon Japanese women.
There is also an undertow of lesbian feeling in Jane's relationship with the Japanese, which complicates her encounters. And it is reciprocated by Sayo Inaba's Setsuko, a married country girl with children.
With lessons in English grammar, Jane instructs the girl in notions of freedom. From letters, diaries, and monologue we understand the impact she has but when she goes off to Tokyo and to Mie, a sophisticated lady university professor, she leaves the girl striving to escape.
Setsuko discovers that Tokyo offers her nothing but sexual humiliation. And, ironically, though the tea ceremony helps Jane to understand the Japanese character, she does not realise until too late that Setsuko has become the equivalent of the Victorian adulteress - outcast from husband and children.
Penny Casdagli's production cannot disguise the play's origins as a radio script. And Liz da Costa's design, with its curtain screens and bare, raised centre stage, is primarily ceremonial.
Carol Leader's Jane manages only to project hearty winsomeness and fails to sound any deeper notes. But the power of this alluring, provocative little play lies in the writing and the sharp acting of Sayo Inaba and Zienia Merton - as respective examples of Japanese simplicity and sophisticated awareness.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
John Barber
Anyone who thinks of Japan as a land of busy bees, manufacturing electronic gadgets and efficient cars, will get a shock from Present Continuous, a touching little play now at the Offstage Downstairs, Chalk Farm.
Japan's mediaeval treatment of some women certainly came as a shock to the aggressively feminist Jane, the English teacher quartered in a backward village where she finds that her gentle landlady is by tradition expected to slave for her husband and take her dragonish mother-in-law on every shopping excursion.
Carol leader, all matey smiles and hearty goodwill, makes bracing figure of Jane, while Sayo Inaba lends a winning femininity to the downtrodden and reserved wife.
But when a third character comes on to the scene, the suave woman professor Mie (Zienia Merton), Jane is whisked off to Tokyo, where, unexpectedly, her new friend persuades her of the spiritual significance of the tea-ceremony and other ancient customs.
Although short, Sonja Lyndon's didactic drama takes a little too long to make its ironical point about the bull-in-a-Japan-shop clumsiness of Jane's attempt to reconcile East and West.
Nevertheless, the piece, skilfully played by the three actresses under the direction of Penny Casdagli, is sufficiently novel to hold the stage, and leaves one with a salutary reminder of a darker side of the land of the rising sun.
