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By PAUL BRENNER
A failed writer returns home to visit his family and his father asks, "What's it
like lad? To be back home again after all this time?" The son remarks blandly,
"Oh, I don't know, Dad. Very much the same." It is this sameness and the
festering wounds and resentments underneath that playwright David Storey
explores in his 1969 Royal Court Theatre production of "In Celebration." The
film version, direction by Lindsay Anderson, is now available on Kino Video as
part of the American Film Theatre Collection.
Anderson revisits the working class mining milieu that he explored in his first
feature, "This Sporting Life," a film also based on the work of David Storey.
"In Celebration" concerns a return visit of three sons of working class parents,
coming back to their childhood hearth and home to celebrate their parents'
fortieth wedding anniversary. With the arrival of each son, more and more of the
happy family façade is peeled away in "a sort of soulless stirring of the pot."
After Alan Bates, with his trademarked verbal daggers, arrives, the characters
become revelatory ID monsters exposing their own miseries and poking away at the
hidden miseries of others. Anderson effectively directs the caterwauling and
grounds the family in its working class environs but the structure of the play
had, by 1969, had become clichéd and the proceedings seem distilled through the
previous work of Pinter, Albee, Williams, and Miller. The work is effective but
familiar.
The DVD includes a number of special features -- an interview with Alan Bates,
an interview with David Storey, an essay by Michael Feingold, the AFT Cinebill,
a stills gallery, and a collection of essays concerning the American Film
Theatre. |
