Theatre Review - Table (Tower Theatre Company)

Go on then, table, you were there, you've always been there, you speak.

One table - worn, scuffed, scratched and stained over six generations. This hand-crafted heirloom of the Best family has seen and borne it all - conception, death and every raw life experience in between. It's a lot for any piece of furniture to bear, let alone a theatrical production, but Tower Theatre carry the ambition of Tanya Ronder's play with apparent ease. I say apparent because this polished product is clearly the result of hard and detailed graft.

Table begins in the late 19th and early 21st centuries, as the table's maker - carpenter David Best - applies loving final touches to his creation, while over a century later his descendent Gideon pores over the wood's many blemishes. But the scars in the wood are nothing to those inflicted, however inadvertently, by Best family members on each other. Starting and ending in England, Ronder's saga takes us halfway around the world and back with the eponymous table in tow. It braves some emotionally dark territory in charting one line of the family tree and how pain can be paid forward down the branches, but there's humour too - along with love and regret and a yearning to make amends.

Tower's production takes the same loving approach to the play as David to one of his newly crafted furnishings. At the beginning the component parts of this non-linear narrative are disjointed, but by the end they dovetail into something genuinely beautiful. The table as focal point has inspired the production's theatre-in-the-round setting along with its minimalism, both lighting and sound subtly enhancing the action. Multi-stranded acapella singing by the actors, of songs passed down through the family, is particularly effective in joining things together - and at points the music is spine-tinglingly gorgeous. 

As for the ensemble, their talents have been shaped into something truly impressive. A cast of nine take on twenty-three roles and while immaculate costume choices help them out, the transformations are largely achieved through physicality (likewise the massive age-range from newborn to grandparent). When an actor walks off returning moments later as his own dad, and the audience instantly makes the adjustment, you know how much this production is getting right. Nor does it seem wise to pick out individual performances from so tight-knit a piece of storytelling. Everyone has their moment, so that even one of the more subdued characters can suddenly deliver an emotional belter of a scene out of nowhere.

Table's first act engages through painstakingly observed character work and the intrigue of all those family connections, before ending on a strikingly surreal, amusing and poignant set-piece. But it's only been warming its audience up. Act two will knock you into submission with a series of powerfully delivered emotional punches - some tender, some devastating. To the show's credit it also succeeds in being hugely funny. I laughed louder than at most film comedies this year and - yes - I cried your actual tears. The rest of the time I just sat mesmerised. 

I'm being vague, I know, because one of the joys of this experience was being surprised. Table is a play of quite staggering ambition, but Simona Hughes' production for Tower wrangles it into a coherent whole - a story that's as moving as it is intermittently hilarious... as it is thought-provoking. 

You can still see it at Tower Theatre, Northwold Road, Stoke Newington on 23 & 24 November (7.30pm, Sat. matinee 3.00pm) and 27 Nov - 1 Dec (7.30pm, Sat. matinee 3.00pm). Click here to access the Tower online Box Office. I strenuously recommend that you do. A seat at this Table is something to cherish.