Edinburgh 2012: Blink at the Traverse Theatre

Phil Porter’s Blink belongs to a niche but recognisable sub-genre: that of the bitter-sweet, self-consciously quirky, not-quite love story. Which means that while the play includes some ‘rom’ and a fair bit of ‘com’, there’s also consensual stalking, bereavement, a girl in a coma and a fox with the mange.

Both Jonah and Sophie have had sheltered childhoods – he grew up as part of a rural religious community, she grew up on the Isle of Man – both lost a parent to cancer and are still dealing with the impact of that loss, both are now living alone in London, specks in a swarming city.

Sophie in particular worries that she may actually be disappearing, that this growing fir-cone feeling inside of her may be spreading and that people will soon no longer be able to see her. So by means of a camera and video monitor she invites Jonah – who lives in the flat below – to watch her, and in doing so she makes herself visible once more. Jonah meanwhile is the type of young man who takes this unusual offering in his stride: in fact it fills a need in him; he’s content to observe her from a distance, to share small everyday moments at a degree of remove. But as he their ‘relationship’ grows more intense and he starts to shadow her in public, to encroach on her space, he is in danger of breaching their unspoken pact.

The strength of Porter’s writing lies in its use of detail, its attention to specifics and its use of tonal juxtaposition. Joe Murphy’s immensely likeable yet shaded production benefits from two highly complementary performances from Harry McEntire and Rosie Wyatt in roles that seem tailored to their individual strengths as performers. With his neatly parted, Ken doll hair and his ever-hopeful, eager expression, McEntire conveys an aching sense of being slightly out of step with other people. His obsessive tendencies are made to seem very much part of the fabric of his character and he manages to make the kind of behaviour that might be alarming in others feel, if not exactly endearing, than an understandable response to complex emotional terrain. Wyatt in many ways has the slightly harder job: her character’s idiosyncrasies are much subtler, but her considerable charm as a performer – as witnessed in Jack Thorne’s Bunny, another nabokov production – means that she is never outshone.

In the beginning they each occupy their separate space on the moss-green, autumnal stage, seated at orderly metal desks, looking out at the audience as they relate their twin stories rather than at each other. The opening passages of the play are in part reminiscent of Daniel Kitson’s It’s Only Right Now Until It’s Later, but Porter’s writing veers off in a slightly different direction as the piece develops and they edge closer together.

There are times when the kookiness of the whole thing feels a little too engineered, the characters’ collage of quirks a little too contrived, but this is redeemed by a downbeat, melancholy ending. These two people probably can’t fix one another – perhaps no one can – but in their own way they can offer each other solace, which in this messy, all too often hostile, world might just be enough.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Winterlong at Soho Theatre

Andrew Sheridan’s brutal debut, the joint winner of the 2008 Bruntwood Prize, is a play that leaves a mark, a bruise, the imprint of fingers round a thin wrist. The writing is vivid and intense, full of bleak volleys. A mother describes the many ways she could have killed her unwanted child with an almost poetic exuberance; the fallout of a nuclear blast is described with similar verve.


Oscar is a child no-one seems capable of loving. His young mother, in a relationship with a controlling, volatile man, abandons him and his grandparents struggle to show any affection for this scrap of a boy they’ve been left to raise. He grows up lonely, friendless, but not broken; he remains oddly unbowed.


The play spans a period of roughly fifteen years, from Oscar’s birth to his teenage years. Sheridan takes a recognisable kind of English domesticity and tugs at it, distorting and exaggerating it, stretching it out like a piece of well-chewed gum. Familiar things – deck chairs, a battered child’s paddling pool, an artificial Christmas tree that has seen better days – take on a new resonance in this world. The play is stuffed with perverts and aggressors, men who loiter with intent; few scenes pass without talk of bums, cum and pus. A rare moment of brightness ends with a bird shitting on someone’s head.


Everything stinks, everything is broken down; this is a world in a process of collapse and decay, shaped by pain and the inevitability of abandonment. This unrelenting quality has its moments of absurdity, there is humour in it, of a kind, and Sheridan acknowledges this and, plays upon it: scabs are picked, Mars bars are popped down pants for ‘softening.’ There is humanity as well as humour, a small buoy bobbing on a grey wave of despair, a note of hope. There needs to be.


Sarah Frankcom’s direction and the performances she draws from the cast add to this sense of balance. Harry McEntire (so memorable as Chadwick Mead in Frankcom’s production of Simon Stephens’ Punk Rock) is endearingly awkward yet resilient as Oscar and it’s hard not to feel for him when he hides his face in his jumper and tries to eat his ice cream through the wool. Paul Copley and Gabrielle Reidy play his grandparents as two people who have had the colour drained from them over their lives, slump-shouldered, accustomed to upset and loss. Laurence Mitchell plays a string of characters, all differently menacing and unsettling, while Rebecca Callard plays Oscar’s mother, hardening as the play progresses.


Amanda Stoodley’s set is fittingly non-naturalistic, a cave-like space with a fractured, cracked floor and walls made up of the acquired junk of life: suitcases, tennis rackets, and an old television set piled and packed under plastic sheeting like a cross between a suburban attic and a crime scene. At the end of each scene, the props are piled in a growing heap in the corner, like rubbish on a tip.


While the influences of the writing are at times all too obvious, Sheridan’s play feels like a work in a particular tradition rather than a pastiche. It has its own rhythms and cadences, its own drive, though the pacing sometimes wavers and there are slumps as well as highs. The final scene, a bit too cyclical and neat perhaps, has a power of its own and the play as a whole has the capacity to leave the audience dazed and gaping. There is a moment of hesitancy before the applause begins.


Reviewed for Exeunt

A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky at the Lyric

The world is about to end. A cosmic string is about to slice and dice the universe and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. We’re all going to die.

This is the backcloth to A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, a new play by David Eldridge, Robert Holman and Simon Stephens. The imminent end of everything brings the spectacularly messy Benton clan back together, to spend their last moments as a family. The five Benton brothers range in age from the terminally ill William, who may not live long enough to die along with everyone else, to teenage Philip, who is just awakening to his homosexuality knowing he will have little chance to fully experience love, intimacy, sex.

This is a family blessed with more than their fair share of secrets and dark, buried things. Some of these are allowed to surface, others remain half-submerged and murky. One of the brothers has been left raising his grandson on his own; another has drifted off onto the fringes of society and is glimpsed hobbled and begging in Euston Square. There are hints at past indiscretions and upsets, some family taint inherited from their maternal grandmother, Dority, who sought comfort from her volatile husband in the arms of a German refugee.

Much is left ambiguous and teasingly out of focus. There are sudden springs of poetry and moments of aching tenderness. Philip and William’s fleeting instance of understanding and connection sitting out in the fields of the family farm is beautifully played and a silent scene where Anne Mitchell’s matriarch bathes her dying son is also strange and affecting in its exposure.

As the end of the world creeps closer, time starts to slip and slide and Philip is able to see into his family’s past. Yet the play allows only the slimmest of windows onto the social unravelling caused by the coming apocalypse; the characters exist in a bubble, unpunctured. The ending of life on earth feels secondary to the depiction of this single family and their complex web of stories. There is little indication of global turmoil; a skin of normality remains in place and there is always room for cheese.

Despite having three writers, the play feels - for the most part - of one voice, even though the temptation to look for the joins, to tease out favoured themes is a strong one. But for all the little flashes of magic and beauty in the writing the finished play feels as it is masking a stronger one. As it is, ideas flare up and burn out; some of the characters’ actions seem inexplicable (a beloved dog is killed) and some of the moments of emotional outburst feel unearned. The writing is also not that well served by Sean Holmes’ direction and the pacing is rather static and plodding; the characters sometimes seem to be talking at one another rather than with one another.

Most of the acting is superb, particularly from Harry McEntire, as the bright, wondering Philip, but the production as a whole feels a little awkward and unfinished, tugged, perhaps, in one too many directions.

Reviewed for musicOMH