It's true the pace was slow and the lack of a strong through-line of narrative providing the shape and forward moving drive did mean we had to let ourselves settle into the images and the recurring ritual and let them give us a sense of the long and heavy trudge on the trail. For me that worked well. The ritual was enacted right from the start in the fluidly choreographed construction of the canvas topped wagon and continued in the transitions from one episode to the next.
The episodes themselves, little scenes of life and family relationships on the trail, seemed true to the matter-of-fact way Annis Harker reported them. They were not spectacular. Much like one would experience anywhere. It was the context that was unique. I liked this juxtaposition of the everyday with the epic.
This talking to the audience continued within the play itself. They joked about just being three women and assured us there were men too. And, lo, they duly appeared as life-sized puppets, sketchily dressed, a bit like scarecows, manipulated by the three women (double meaning intended). They do it again, though more theatrically, in their repeated mantra in the between-scene trudging, "imagine three women..." Think of the Prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V exhorting us to ..." entertain conjecture of a time ..." And of Brecht's ways of reminding us these are only actors. It's in a long tradition and one that has been well mined in the North not so long ago with issue plays and documentary drama. Alan Plater's "Close the Coalhouse Door" comes to mind.
For me it doesn't break the spell, as it does for some, so much as intensify it - when, that is, the scenes that follow are effectively done. And here I was a bit frustrated. The actors had done so much to create these scenes and the ideas were there. But they needed to take a moment or two longer to express and hold on to the significant moments of feeling and relationship. All right, we don't want it overegged, but we do need to be drawn in to the emotional drama of each scene, withheld in the diary entries, be it the death of the father/husband, or a sense of love and unity in singing round the harmonium. That's what theatre is about, making visible the invisible. They did seem to jump too readily out of the scenes into the trudge, and thus flattened out the drama as a whole.
Maybe making more music would have helped. Like with so much else, they did that beautifully. I longed for more of that.
If you've not seen it, do try to catch it on its tour, the schedule for which you can see on their website
It's well worth it.
I was one who left disappointed at this depiction of one of the great journey's of the 19th century. The Oregon Trail took between 4-6 months to cover the 2,000 miles across North America - walking alongside cattle drawn carts. 'Home on the Range' is the story of three Yorkshire dales women leaving home for a promise of a new life, used to a hard life for sure, but finding themselves in a new society, terrain and climate. Their journey would have been nothing less than a physical and emotional assault which we should have seen depicted but rarely glimpsed. The intensity of the heat and the cold, the exhaustion, the dirt, the broken hearts and the danger (thousands died from disease, freezing, drowning and attacks) could have been communicated to us but wasn't. Yes they are only actors and we are only the audience but if, as I felt, I was only engaged when they were trying to sell programmes the evening was destined to be a disappointment and I'm afraid it was.
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