Ciaran Bagnall’s set is starkly impersonal in its shiny whiteness and sculpted clean lines. Two arching struts rise up at the back of the stage and curve slightly above it. The overall image suggests giant, geometrical fallopian tubes and womb. In this clinical setting, Colin and Anne are trying to conceive. Their couplings are intimate, funny, touching – and all the more convincing for the actors remaining fully clad. Cool, scientific logic contrasts with the messiness of life throughout David Rudkin’s 1972 play – as fiercely intelligent as it is moving.
The first half focuses on the couple’s journey through the indignities of early 1970s fertility treatments: intimate medical examinations, masturbation-on-demand, the bathing of testicles in cold water, adopting a doggie position to encourage sperm to mutate ovum-wards, scheduling sex by temperature chart. Psychologically well observed and deeply affecting, Anne and Colin’s struggle to bring a new life into the world (subtly realised by Katy Cavanagh and Colin Connor, with no trace of marshmallow sentimentality) is, we gradually discover, one part of the play’s wider focus on identity and being.
Three extended monologues dominate the second half and expose connections between the couple’s particular situation and wider existential choices and responsibilities. An adoptions officer lectures potential adoptive parents about relations between children and families. Colin, returning from a family funeral in Northern Ireland, describes horrors of violence and interrogates complexities of relationships with family and native land. Anne digs up blighted potatoes and wonders about humanity’s relation with nature.
David Thacker’s elegant direction subtly emphasises interconnectedness. For instance, one character may be alone in a scene, speaking their thoughts (as they often do) directly to the audience, and meanwhile, at the edges of the stage, other cast members sit still and quiet – not directly participating, but, by their presence, implicated in coexistence.
Rudkin’s writing blends everyday exchanges, phrases of Shakespearean resonance and expressions of poetic intensity. It is direct, vibrant and uncondescending. In Ashes, he sows seeds of ideas and trusts the audience to see them germinate.
