Along with The Forsyte Saga in its main space, the Park Theatre is having a bit of a moment for literary adaptations. Autumn is adapted by Harry McDonald from Scottish author Ali Smith’s 2016 novel of the same name – one of four seasonally titled state-of-the-nation works that Smith wrote in quick succession after the Brexit referendum.
Charlotte Vickers’s production bounces back and forth between the post-referendum present day and art lecturer Elisabeth Demand’s memories of meeting with her enigmatic, elderly neighbour, Daniel Gluck, as a teenager. As the adult Elisabeth navigates a strained relationship with her mother and what feels like an increasingly unfriendly UK, she reads to a sleeping Daniel in his care home.
Vickers stages the play with fluid simplicity, using fragments to create a heightened whole. Grace Venning’s deliberately sparse set is a versatile, almost surrealistic space in which Ali Hunter’s lighting and Jamie Lu’s soundscape blur the boundaries between memories and dreams. It also nicely captures Elisabeth’s growing sensation of living in a coldly unfamiliar country.
Adaptor McDonald foregrounds the book’s focus on how, via Brexit, misogyny or simply the passage of time, people’s lives are stripped of their complexity, diminished or forgotten. Real-life 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty, who Daniel knew and whose works he introduces to Elisabeth, is a through-line. Her repeated ‘rediscovery’ by artistic gatekeepers is a cycle that the play challenges in an extended dream sequence that gives her voice.
It’s all evocatively done, with a strong anchoring performance by Rebecca Banatvala. She switches well between the defiantly curious teenage and wearily defensive adult versions of Elisabeth. As she keeps bumping up against an uncaring, ID-obsessed British bureaucracy, she has a great foil in Nancy Crane, who’s deliciously venomous as everyone from a spitefully officious Post Office employee to a security guard.
However, perhaps partly due to the book’s in-the-moment processing of then-immediate events, the play’s slender narrative also meanders. Its poetic and meditative tone lacks momentum, with some scenes simply drifting on for too long. It also has a tendency towards whimsical impressionism that affects the characters. Gary Lilburn is quirkily endearing as Daniel, and Sophie Ward brings pathos to Elisabeth’s mother. But they exist more as ideas than people.