Mary Broome at the Orange Tree Theatre

What’s in a name? An awful lot, a life, a past: to have a name is to exist, to be recognised. Mary Broome has worked as a housemaid for the prosperous Timbrell family for years, yet they only have cause to learn her surname when it transpires, on the eve of a family wedding, that their younger son Leonard has got her ‘in trouble.’ Suddenly they’re forced to see her as a person rather than as part of the furniture, a speck in their peripheral vision. Later the family congratulate themselves on letting another housemaid hang on to her ‘awful’ given name of Beryl rather than insisting she change it to something more palatable.

It says much about both playwright and play that Allan Monkhouse chose to use her name as his title. Monkhouse, a critic and literary editor for the Manchester Guardian as well as a socially minded playwright who had several plays staged at Manchester’s Gaiety Theatre, was clearly very interested in the interplay between the servant class and their employers. He was also interested in intergenerational relationships and this play, first staged in 1911, is as much about the gulf in attitude and understanding between young Leonard Timbrell and his father as it is about Mary.

The couple are obliged to marry and do a good job of coping with the situation until Leonard’s runaway tongue causes his father to cut off their allowance entirely. While Mary grows ever anxious over money and the health of their child, Leonard lounges around and vaguely considers pawning his pocket watch. A sub-Wildean aesthete lacking only the lily in his lapel, he was a source of torment and confusion to his rather Victorian father even before this latest indiscretion. Though he’s perceptive, expressive, and quite unlike his stuffy elder brother, he is also, as he confesses, quite ‘rotten with egoism’ and is capable of being just as blind and cruel as his father when he chooses. At times his aestheticism feels like a defence for idleness (he’s a writer, but there’s no real sense that he’s particularly gifted) and the whole situation like an amusing adventure, while Mary’s whole life and sense of herself has been uprooted.

The situation also seems to awaken something in Leonard’s cowed mother. Though she repeatedly and rather too vocally insists on her own weakness in the face of her husband’s bluster, she also confesses that she believes that there’s “something in what these suffrage people say.”

Jack Farthing manages to convey the conflicting aspects of Leonard’s personality; he is charismatic and honest yet oddly hollow and casual in his cruelty, quite astonishingly unlikeable at times. He views everything at a remove, barely acknowledges his son, but seems – briefly at least – saddened by his inability to feel anything more deeply than he does. Katie McGuinness has an apt placidity as Mary, a woman used to accepting the various hands that life has dealt her, but who is also quite unshakeable when she sets her mind to a thing. Eunice Roberts also gives an intriguingly shaded performance as Mrs Timbrell, a woman who – at times at least – seems far more questing and aware than others of her generation, but whose love for her son blinds her to his faults.

Monkhouse’s play sets its stall deftly. The situation and characters are elegantly established and while it’s not as socially probing as a play by someone like Granville-Barker, it remains a strong piece of comic writing with a conscience and would probably have been considered rather daring in its day. But the play loses steam by the second half and his portrait of Leonard and Mary’s life together is less convincing. The final scene sees everything tied up rather too quickly and neatly (when one learns that Mary has been stepping out with the Jonsonianly monikered milkman George Truefitt it’s not that hard to guess how things will end up for her) and there’s only the lightest sense that anyone has learned anything, Mary excepted, from this unfortunate episode.

Auriol Smith’s production is pleasingly pacey  for a revival of an Edwardian play and this despite some lengthy scene changes. That the furniture is shifted and the cushions plumped by women in housemaids’ attire does serve as a neat reminder of how these people’s lives were oiled and their homes made comfortable by the labour of others, but these interludes also serve to slow down and break up the flow of the drama.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Theatre Uncut

Theatre Uncut is a refusal to lie down and be silent. As the project’s co-ordinator, Hannah Price of Reclaim, has explained, it’s about theatre contributing to the discussion and “joining our voice with the voices that are already out there.” This is not just a response to the cuts in the arts, rather a broader response to the spending cuts in general; an attempt to spark debate and stir feelings.

The project consists of eight short plays by Mark Ravenhill, Lucy Kirkwood, David Grieg, Jack Thorne, Dennis Kelly, Laura Lomas, Anders Lustgarten and Clara Brennan. The plays have been made available rights-free to anyone who wants to stage them. On the 19th March, they will performed by an eclectic array of theatre groups – including am-dram groups and student groups – across the UK (as well as in New York, Chicago and Berlin) with the resulting productions linked together by online networking and video conferencing.

Before that the pieces are being staged in London’s Southwark Playhouse to allow all eight to be seen together. Each writers response has been different; some take a more opaque approach while others aim for the throat – or rather the heart in the case of the first play in the showcase, Laura Lomas’ Open Heart Surgery, a raw allegorical monologue delivered by a woman by a hospital bedside, trying to put a brave face on the fact that something she loves has had its heart ripped out. Dennis Kelly’s Things That Make No Sense is a spikier piece of writing, a Kafka-esque skit in which a man is punished for a crime he didn’t commit, his protests ignored by a pair of smiling police officers.

David Grieg’s piece Fragile is a two-hander in which, in a nod to austerity, the audience is required to play one of the parts, reading their lines en masse from projections on the back of the stage. It takes the form of a conversation between a young man with mental health issues and his case worker; light-hearted at first it becomes increasingly taut as Greig makes the audience think about those at the hard-edge who stand to lose the most as well as the people in between, the people whose jobs are going to become an awful lot harder (that is if they still have jobs)

Both Jack Thorne and Lucy Kirkwood, in Whiff Whaff and Housekeeping, take slightly slanted paths towards the subject at hand. Thorne’s play depicts a cheerful middle class couple who describe how they believe that providing support for the disabled or ailing is somehow defeatist: “The thing is with crutches, they’re crutches.” In Kirkwood’s piece, which has more of a poetic intensity than its premise would suggest, a woman sells off her grandmother to help clear her debts. The grandmother, played by Marlene Sidaway, eyes Zawe Ashton’s brisk, business-like accountant with recognition. She’s marched from Jarrow, debated at Putney; she’s been here before.

Anders Lustgarten’s contribution is not a character piece at all rather a polemic delivered by the playwright himself, in which he neatly explains the economics of the Greek bailout before urging the audience to get angry, to lose their rag, to wake up to the changes they can exert collectively if they try; to, as he puts it, “fuck the fat man” of capitalism.

Mark Ravenhill’s piece, A Bigger Banner, written in response to and in honour of the recent student protests, employs a time-slip set-up in which a student at a university sit-in encounters her 1950s counterpart and ends up reassuring her that the future she’s fighting for so passionately will indeed come to pass. Interestingly it is Ravenhill and Lustgarten’s pieces that have proved most popular with younger groups, perhaps because of their clarity of message, their undiluted call to activism.

The evening concludes with Clara Brennan’s moving monologue Hi Vis, featuring Lisa Palfrey as a mother of a severely disabled daughter, describing her child with love and humour. Each play has its own particularly potency, and though some are blunter instruments than others, together they succeed in their intention to stir, to connect, to create an engagement that spills beyond the theatre walls.

Reviewed for Exeunt I'd also recommend reading Aliki Chapple's account of staging the plays in Lancaster, here.

For further information about the project, visit Theatre Uncut

Woman Bomb at the Tristan Bates Theatre

Woman Bomb, by the Croatian playwright Ivana Sajko, is as much about one woman’s journey towards becoming a suicide bomber as it is about the creative process involved in imagining such a journey.

Though subtitled ‘a monologue for a woman-bomb, a name-less politician, his bodyguards and mistress, God, a choir of angels, a worm, the Mona Lisa, twenty friends of mine, my mother and me,’ and previously performed as a solo piece, under the direction of Maja Milatović-Ovadia and Vanda Butković, the play is voiced by three women. This has the effect of giving shape to the playwright’s internal conversations as well as form to the woman-bomb herself (played with suitable intensity by Laura Harling).

Sajko’s play is a layered to the point of being messy, flicking back and forth between the self-interrogatory and the exploratory, merging dreams and digressions in what often comes across as a relentless stream of consciousness splurge (or, possibly, a purge). She has said that the author is always hidden somewhere in every playwright’s work so she chooses not to hide herself nor her role as the writer. Having embarked on the project Sajko emails twenty of her friends to ask how they would behave if they had only twelve minutes and thirty-six seconds to live, and weaves their responses into the text. She feeds her audience the fruits of her research. Most female suicide bombers are young; 22, we are told, is the average age. For some it’s the only way of restoring honour to their family after perceived sexual transgression, for others the reasons are murkier and less easy to grasp. A section of the play is devoted to a discussion of Dhanu, the woman who assassinated Rhajiv Ghandi, and to descriptions of the photographs taken both before and after she detonated the explosives strapped to her middle.

Sajko equates this terminal act with pregnancy; she describes the intimacy between bomber and bomb, metal against skin, and blurs the line between destruction and creation. The woman-bomb is forced on her back and has her belly pawed and fondled by the other two women, pages of script are stuffed beneath her clothes to give her stomach the false curve of pregnancy. The woman-bomb speaks through a mouthful of apple (what else?) and the final act of detonation is described in near-sexual terms, a sticky embrace, while fear and the bomber’s desire to self-betray take the form of a literal ear-worm, a squirmy nervous creature on her shoulder. Footage of the rotting body of a dog is projected on a screen in one corner of the stage. Any discussion of political motivation is, for the most part, pushed to one side; it’s the psychological that fixates Sajko, the contents of the bomber’s mind in those last fraught minutes.

The riper passages of Sajko’s play hover, at times uneasily, between abstraction and incoherence. There are puns – a‘Prada Meinhoff bra’- but also many other instances where the adverb-heavy language jars. Perhaps this is an issue of translation or perhaps the result of more intrinsic linguistic differences between Croatian and English; the writing is sometimes poetic, but sometimes blunt, jagged, cluttered (full of sentences like this: “aeroplanes fly over my desk, scanning my manuscripts, my skull, ribs, spine and limb-bones, noting my body postures, the composition of liquid in my cup and the burned misery of a war-torn scenery.”).

Butković’s set design consists of a writer’s desk and a collection of floor tiles set in sand that crack and slide (rather noisily) under the performers’ feet, until, with papers strewn everywhere and furniture upended, the room looks not unlike a bombsite.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Cleansing of Constance Brown, A.E. Harris Building, Birmingham

A corridor is not a destination. It’s a place of transition, of passage; a place people move through, not to.

First staged in 2007, Stan’s Café's mesmeric production takes place in a chilly warehouse in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. The stage takes the form of a stretch of corridor two metres wide and fourteen metres deep; facing the audience end-on, the space is spot-lit from above and has doorways on either side, doorways through which it’s impossible to see. It’s a space through which people are constantly moving, darting from one entrance to another in various guises; moments of stillness are rare and all the more potent for that.

This corridor becomes an ‘anywhere’ space; it is a prison, a hotel, the hallway in an apartment building, an office complex. It slip-slides through time, from the Elizabethan era to the recognisable present, a collage of narrative fragments that often overlap and intersect. Sometimes it is lit with torch beams like some early episode of The X Files, at other times by the lamp of a Florence Nightingale figure who peers with concern into the various rooms.

The act of looking in and on is a recurring trope. In a production performed with minimal dialogue and a cranium-pounding soundtrack, the audience are left to guess at what’s going on behind the doors. At one point police officers force their way through one doorway while a Jewish man and his wife emerge from another pushing a pram laden with their possession. In this way the responses and reactions of the ‘characters’ become the main event. This is an incredibly powerful device, tapping into everything from way that key incidents are reported in Greek drama to the modern obsession with conspiracy, with shadowy goings-on behind closed doors, decisions being made and plots being hatched. This is emphasised by the vaguely sinister black-suited men with earpieces who pop up at various points in the proceedings to stand guard, arms folded and vigilant.

Only on a couple of occasions does the production break this pattern of observing from the outside, most notably when the aftermath of a raucous office party circa 1985 segues into a scene of soldiers tormenting prisoners in Abu Ghraib. A gaggle of quivering men, cuffed and hung-over, become meat for manipulation, to be posed and humiliated. It takes a moment for the click to come, for this transition to sink in.

Constance Brown is steeped in cinematic reference, sometimes overt, sometimes less so. Various genre markers are employed, sci-fi, horror, a semiotic smorgasbord. In one of the more blatant moments a priest armed with holy water pursues a twitching, wild-eyed girl in a nightgown. There are nods to The Shining and at one point a 1950s B-movie blob engulfs the whole space. It is also frequently witty, with a number of neat visual gags: a woman in a burka walks past a woman whited out with terry cloth and cold cream and they both register curiosity and amusement.

The act of cleaning is a recurring theme: people mop and sweep and polish the walls. At one point the buzz of a vacuum cleaner adds another layer to an already pulsating soundscape. There are echoes of Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things: these are the people who clean up the mess of the world once the lights have been switched off. It’s also difficult not to think of Rupert Goold’s staging of Enron when documents, shredded in panic, rain down like so much wedding confetti. And who is Constance? It’s not always clear. She’s the woman on the edges, in the background, peering through doorways, inquisitive, bemused, aghast.

The piece is performed by seven cast members, though one feels the need to double-check that number as there are so many costume changes (there are 68 distinct characters in all), so many shifts, that it often feels like the work of far more. The production has a relentless quality and teeters on the brink of becoming wearying as it tips over the hour mark, but director James Yarker ensures there’s enough textural variety to stop it becoming too oppressive. At the end the audience are invited to inspect the spaces behind and between for themselves, to get a glimpse of the workings behind the seemingly seamless. This just adds another layer of appreciation to what is already – in so very many ways – an exciting piece of theatre.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Moment at the Bush Theatre

The ritual of tea-making plays a large part in Irish playwright Deirdre Kinhan’s tense drama. In moments of familial crisis, people reach for the kettle. The tea doesn’t always get drunk, the stuff in the cup is almost secondary, but it’s the act of making it that matters, the sense of purpose provided, the long wait for the kettle to sing.

Kinahan’s play illustrates how one awful act, one unreclaimable moment of violence, can shatter a family, can have consequences that bleed through the years. Around fifteen years ago, while still a teenager, Nial Lynch committed a crime, he killed someone. He’s paid for it; he’s served his time, and after his release he was able to go and live in London where he became a successful artist. His sisters, however, Niamh and Ciara, stayed behind, left with the mess, with a father who would die young from the stress and a mother who pops pills like sweets in an effort to shut out the past. They were left to face the reproachful stares of the neighbours and to tend to their damaged parents.

Now Nial is coming home for a visit. Recently married, his English bride Ruth wants to meet her new family. She’s been told about Nial’s background but it’s clear she doesn’t fully understand the consequences, not completely, and over the course of one exquisitely tense meal, the full impact of Nial’s act comes flooding up.

Kinahan roots their story in the everyday, in the domestic and familiar, in cups of tea and plates of quiche, in shop-bought potato salad. Though an evident tension between mother and daughters is there from the beginning, she takes her time in exploring it, exposing it. The mother’s weakness and dependence, and the way she uses it to subtly control them, only gradually becomes apparent.

Maybe because of its size the Bush does gripping kitchen scenes very well. There are echoes of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Apologia, also staged in this space, in this pivotal meal, in the way the kitchen table becomes a site of familial dissection, with all their old wounds opened up. The second half of David Horan’s production never quite matches the momentum of the first and the play too becomes a blunter instrument, dabbling in flashback.

Maeve Fitzgerald and Kate Nic Chonaonaigh are both compelling as the Lynch sisters. Fitzgerald is brittle and tightly wound, forever on the brink of exasperation and outburst; her face tells of the effort required in not speaking and occasionally, inevitably, she erupts. Chonaonaigh is far calmer, playing someone long accustomed to steadying the boat. Yet she too carries a weight around her neck and ultimately needs to unburden herself. Ronan Leahy is more impenetrable as Nial, There is anger there but also frustration and the sense that he still doesn’t fully grasp either why he did what he did or the full implications of his actions.

There’s something almost serene in the way Deirdre Donnelly plays their mother Teresa. She’s a passive woman, but one capable of calculation, a woman who has developed strategies to ensure her own survival in the face of all that’s happened. Kinahan makes it clear that she already played upon her fragility even before the incident and this tactic has become her crutch, a vital part of who she is.

Kinhan is not afraid to tap the situation for comedy, using the characters of the two men in the sisters’ lives, Dave and Fin, to balance the emotional see-saw and provide some necessary levity. Only Ruth, the new bride, the interloper, never really rings true as a character in her reactions and expectations, she’s a tool, a catalyst. The production is well-paced, especially in its first half, and Kinahan sculpts events with elegance, adding characters, building to a pitch, and then allowing events to fade, to dissipate, as the family scatters once more and Niamh is left alone in a dark Dublin kitchen with her memories.

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

The Biting Point at Theatre 503

In a time of protest and unrest, Sharon Clark’s new play, The Biting Point, looks back to the early 1980s, to a time when riots scorched the streets of Southall and Brixton.


The play tells the stories of three characters, a police officer, an angry young man and an ANL supporter, in the days running up to a big march. Clark takes time and care in fleshing out their back-stories and in showing their motivations to be complex, messy and human. Yet even though there’s something slightly too forced and obvious about this desire to show that things are never clear cut as you think and that everyone has their reasons for behaving as they do, Clark goes about it in an intriguing way.
The march itself acts as a catalyst for the out-spilling of suppressed emotions. In many ways this is not a play about the riots at all, they’re simply a means of – violently – bringing these people together.

Malcolm is a hardworking young man who spends much of his spare time looking after his sister who has learning difficulties. He’s kind and patient, a dedicated carer, but it takes all his energy to remain so. He wants more and is beginning to grasp quite how much his sister is holding him back. Things come to a head when he invites a girl he’s attracted to back to their house.

Dennis is a teacher who’s involved in a relationship with one of his students, Anna. He despises himself but he’s weak and she knows it; Anna takes pleasure in exploiting the evident power she has over him. Ruth completes this narrative triangle. She speaks in a succession of oddly charged monologues, ever wary, her body tensing when a hand knocks at the door.

Charlie Holloway gives a an admirably slow-burning performance as Malcolm, a man accustomed to ignoring his own needs and wants, and swallowing his rage until it threatens to choke him. (It is more than fitting that his sister has an obsession with volcanoes and earthquakes). He’s been abandoned by his parents, left to fend for himself, and Clark paints a convincing picture of someone who might find solace and support in an extremist group. Gyuri Sarossy‘s Dennis is revealed to be quite reprehensible in some ways but he retains a degree of charisma throughout. Lizzie Roper’s Ruth stands apart from the other characters. Hers is an intense performance but the character’s instability never quite convinces.

Dan Coleman’s production is measured and restrained and benefits from Mark Friend’s aptly jagged, Futurist set. It’s testament to Coleman’s skill that the production’s most gripping moment is when Malcolm calmly destroys something very precious of his sister’s. Interestingly, when the three stories finally collide, in a suburban back garden with the roar of the crowd and the angry crunch of boots on tarmac growing louder around them, the tension dissipates somewhat. The conclusion lacks the punch of what has gone before.

Clark is rather too deliberate in the way she plays with audience expectations. She holds off assigning ‘sides’ to her characters until near the end – when they all don their various ‘uniforms’ before heading into the fray – but there’s something cautious about her approach, her careful muddying of the moral waters, that means her play is not as hard hitting as it might have been.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Our Private Life at the Royal Court

Pedro Miguel Rozo’s self-labelled family parable is set in a Columbian village on the cusp of becoming a town. Despite the opening of a shiny new shopping mall with its promise of material pleasures and a veneer of urban sophistication, the community still operates like a village; rumours can still spread like a spark through dry grass and the currents of gossip can still pull a man down.

Nothing is truly private in such a place and Rozo emphasises this by muddying the line between interior and exterior. The characters thoughts are often spoken out loud so that not only the audience but also the other characters, can hear them. It is not uncommon for one character to admonish another for not thinking more quietly.

Our Private Life is the first of two plays presented by the Royal Court along with readings and seminars and a second play, Aleksey Scherbak’s Remembrance Day, as part of what they’re terming an International Playwrights Season.

A rumour is doing the rounds that Carlos’s father molested his twelve year old farmhand and this makes Carlos, a “bi-polar compulsive fantasist”, worry that his father may have done the same thing to him when he was a boy. He turns first to Sergio, his older brother (or half-brother, as it turns out), whose marriage and success as a businessman have failed to endear him to their father, and then to his psychiatrist, whose willingness to help Carlos excavate his childhood memories owes much to his desire to own a nicer car.

Rozo’s play, presented in a translation by Simon Scardifield, has a sensational quality and the characters make constant reference to the way unfolding events resemble something out of a daytime soap or a movie. In this light, the performances are pitched at an appropriate level of artifice, encompassing extremes of emotion, with Colin Morgan’s pipe cleaner-limbed Carlos exploding into tears like a hysterical toddler before trying to do away with himself with a butter knife, or the whole family perkily embarking on a doomed Christmas dinner before this too breaks down around them.

Morgan came to prominence in the Young Vic’s adaption of Vernon God Little and indeed Lyndsey Turner’s production shares something of that novel’s Technicolor excess as well as certain parallels of plot; there are also definite echoes of the films of Almodovar in the play’s manner of exaggeration, its relationship with the absurd, and in scenes in which Ishia Bennison’s volatile matriarch flings her prosthetic breast across the kitchen table.

Morgan is springy and boyish, his eyes suggesting both damage and a degree of glee at the chaos wrought. Bennison, as his mother, hits on an intriguing balance as a woman trying to protect her husband from the waves of accusation and ultimately shielding only herself; she maintains a shell that only occasional breaks. Adrian Schiller has the requisite air of tainted professional dignity as the psychiatrist whose wardrobe and whiskey of choice improve in quality as paranoia becomes increasingly rampant in town and his services are more frequently called upon.

Shunt’s Lizzie Clachlan’s set consists of a versatile green sliding panel that resembles a Japanese shōji door in the way it suggests that nothing is ever fully concealed; seen in silhouette it also brings to mind the screen in a confessional.

The pay-off, when it comes – in the form of a downbeat coda- lacks the chill of revelation; the use of sexual abuse as metaphor seems an overplayed device and after the near-cartoonish tone of all that’s gone before, the ugliness that finally comes to light strikes an uneasy note – possibly not in the way intended.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Ordinary Days at the Trafalgar Studios

As one of the characters in Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days points out, her Manhattan is not a Gershwin Manhattan. And yet the soundtrack of her city is not entirely unfamiliar either; it’s literate and witty and inward-looking, full of lyrics about Virginia Woolf, the pairing of red wine with fish and the labyrinthine floor-plan of the Met Museum. It’s well-read and tinged with angst, full of echoes of Jason Robert Brown, Jonathan Larson and Michael John LaChiusa. But while there’s a strong sense of having visited this place before, its characters are recognisable in a good way and it contains a decided emotional charge, balancing out cynicism with sentiment - though at times veering too much towards the latter.

Ordinary Days is a song cycle made up of two New York stories that touch each other without intersecting. Claire and Jason (played by Julia Atherton and Daniel Boys ) are a young couple who finally decide to take the plunge and move in together, but instead of drawing them closer together, this only accentuates the distance between them. Deb is a grad student who’s been so busy running away from the cul-de-sac she grew up on that she’s lost sight of what’s she’s running towards. When her lost thesis notes find their way into the hands of artist’s assistant, Warren, he views the event as kismet, a fated moment, while she just wants the damn things back so she can appease her professor.

The closer Jason tries to get to Claire the more she withdraws. Atherton and Boys have a crabby chemistry which they milk on their duets, particularly during the snippy passive-aggressive back and forth of ‘Fine’. And Atherton demonstrates just how skilled a performer she is when tackling the show’s big emotional number, I’ll Be Here; this is a song that could so easily have come across as mawkish, as manipulative, and yet in her hands it’s delicate and devastating, a genuinely moving moment.

Alexia Khadime, as Deb, and Lee William-Davis, as Warren have slightly less to play with. Khadime’s sweetly soaring voice stands in marked contrast with her character’s fractious personality and she’s gifted with – and revels in – the funniest lines; William-Davis is also endearing though he doesn’t quite nail the needy geekiness of Warren.

Sometimes the writing becomes bogged down with cliché –there’s a riff about overly complicated coffee ordering which feels tired out before it's finished – but director Adam Lenson keeps things light. He knows how to play up the musical’s qualities, having staged it at the Finborough Theatre in 2008 prior to this re-staging in the similarly sized, Trafalgar Studio 2. Indeed space is something of an issue here. While the studio allows for a superb degree of intimacy (with both the performers and with the audience - you could hear each teary sniffle as the show hit its emotional crescendo), it’s also constrictive. With the musicians on stage, the limited floor space is limited further and the performers have little room for manoeuvre, especially when entering and exiting.   The final visual flourish, the moment that unites the two stories, also loses some of its power as a result – if ever a scene needed a higher ceiling, it’s this one.

Alistair Turner’s set is a collection of slightly scuffed white cubes, a basic reproduction of the New York skyline which also double as a set of shelves onto which objects can be placed; this twinning is particularly apt as this is a musical much concerned with our personal debris, the things we hold on to and the things we choose to let go. 

Reviewed for Exeunt

Beachy Head at Jackson's Lane Theatre

Beachy Head, the dramatic white headland of the South Downs, is one of the UK’s most notorious suicide spots. Every year a small number of people will choose to end their life there and it’s this, an attempt to explore this drive towards self-obliteration, which forms the subject matter of Analogue’s production, recast and revised since its appearance at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe (where I first saw it).

Two filmmakers, Joe and Matt, in the process of gathering footage for a project on lighthouses, inadvertently capture the last moments of a young man’s life.  He takes off his boots, throws them aside, and steps off the cliff edge.

As their shock gives way to fascination and curiosity, the two men find themselves becoming increasingly interested in this man’s story. They track down his widow, Amy, and with her permission they begin to make a film about his, Stephen’s, life, something she initially finds useful as a tool for helping her work through – and work out – her emotions.

The production hinges on the moral implications of their actions, or rather their inaction, as they fail to tell Amy about the existence of the footage of her husband’s death, something that becomes increasingly difficult to do as Joe in particular grows closer to the young woman.

The reasons for Stephen’s suicide remain opaque. He is glimpsed in flashback as an introverted and contemplative man, a writer of children’s stories, but he remains a flickering figure, half-hidden, a memory. The company never present a clear-cut reason for his actions, acknowledging in the process the difficulty of doing so, that certain things will always be unknowable.

Instead they turn the production in on itself, examining the very idea of making art about suicide and interrogating the film-maker’s (and indeed the theatre-maker’s) motivations in creating such a piece. The obvious reference point is Eric Steel’s documentary film The Bridge and this is cited by the company as such. It’s interesting to note that (according to Wikipedia that is) a film on Beachy Head suicides was commissioned by Channel 4 but never broadcast.

The production, a devised collaborative piece created by Dan Rebellato, Emma Jowett, Hannah Barker, Liam Jarvis and Lewis Hetherington, makes considerable use of video, live and pre-recorded. A screen at the back of the set is used for the projection of images – of the beckoning sky, of the cool tile of a mortuary; on the reverse of the screen is a mirror, which is used to shift the audience’s perspective and amplify the sense of aloneness as Amy lies in the bed she once shared with her husband. These multimedia elements are never jarring and are, for the most part, well integrated with the fabric of the production and the moment when the filmmakers’ desk, complete with editing equipment, is transformed into the cliff itself is a unifying and potent one.

The narrative is interspersed with scenes in which a pathologist (played by Sarah Belcher) describes her work, the autopsy process, the statistics surrounding suicide, with the necessary professional detachment. This sense of detachment seeps into the piece itself and Joe and Matt never really emerge as characters. Katie Lightfoot, as Amy, however, manages to convey a plausible mixture of shock and a dazed kind of calm at her character’s sudden bereavement while Dan Ford’s Stephen remains – perhaps inevitably – an enigma.

Reviewed for, small drum roll, Exeunt

Water at the Tricycle Theatre

Though Water, a devised piece by physical theatre company Filter and the director David Farr, was first seen on stage in 2007, it feels just as relevant today in the wake of a number of climate change plays, including the National’s recent multi-authored Greeland. Not that Water is a climate change play in the conventional sense. The subject is dealt with, but on a human and intimate level; the company tells two stories that intertwine and echo one another while remaining separate. In the first, Graham, unsociable by nature, awkward and somewhat Eeyore-ish, travels to Canada for his estranged father’s funeral; there he meets his younger half-brother and discovers some unexpected truths about the man his father really was. In the second thread, Claudia, a hard-working political adviser, strives to create some kind of global accord on climate change while in the process jeopardising her relationship with her boyfriend, Joe, a cave diver with his eyes set on the world record. Claudia and Graham both end up in Vancouver, in a glossy waterfront hotel, but they never meet. Sound plays an integral part in the production and Filter’s co-founder, the composer Tim Philips, creates an atmospheric sonic collage of sound effects and music, punctuated by the thud-thud of a heart-beat, the thwack of a squash ball, and cumulating in the unnerving roar of water as a lone man descends into uncharted darkness. Though the spectre of global warming and the threat of rising sea levels background the narrative, they are only one aspect of a production in which the human drama is pushed to the fore. The focus remains fully on these two individuals, both at crisis points in their lives. Filter’s Oliver Dimsdale, Ferdy Roberts and Victoria Moseley share all the roles between themselves, switching nimbly between characters; the backstage crew are also occasionally roped in when a scene requires it and Philips is always visible at the side of the stage, so that the technical process of creating the sound effects is incorporated into the fabric of the production. This perception of transparency is a trait that runs through much of Filter’s work – the cast saunter on stage before the show officially ‘starts’ and are introduced by name – but it’s complementary rather than intrusive, a balance is always maintained. Enough room has been left for characters to evolve. Roberts has perhaps the hardest task in this regard, playing both the dour, unsettled Graham and his more ebullient father, a successful marine biologist and an early cautionary voice about the consequences of global warming; he manages to differentiate between the two men while subtly underlining the paternal connection. Moseley elegantly sidesteps cliché as Claudia, a woman who lives for her work, who is driven and determined to a point that borders on self-sabotage. Dimsdale’s two characters, Graham’s younger brother and Claudia’s boyfriend, are less shaded in comparison though this is more to do with the shape the play takes than his capabilities. It’s true that if one were to strip away the sound effects, the numerous inventive touches and the inflatable fish, then the story might feel anaemic in places; one could also justifiably argue that the techniques used here have been used more dynamically elsewhere, but both observations would be churlish. Substance and surface walk hand in hand in this production, they perform an intricate dance, they form a mutually rewarding partnership.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Greenland at the National Theatre

The polar bear is something of a lumbering paradox; it could kill a man with ease and yet it seems so vulnerable in its whiteness, a vulnerability that has only intensified as its Arctic habitat has come under threat. For this reason the bear, an animal both threatened and threatening, has come to serve as a easy symbol for the damage climate change seems likely to wreak on the planet, for all the things we stand to lose. So the presence of a polar bear in the National Theatre’s attempt to tackle the suject is not exactly surprising, is in fact pretty predictable, and yet this ursine cameo is handled so delightfully that its predictability is eclipsed.

The appearance of the bear, the work of Blind Summit’s puppet-master Mark Down, creates a moment of awe and wonder amid an otherwise noisy and tangled production. Greenland is issue theatre, or perhaps more correctly, Issue Theatre. It takes the subject of climate change and attempts to graft narrative onto it, to inject dramatic life into it. To do this the National has drafted in four writers: Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne. The production has a jumbled quality, a franticness, though it eventually becomes possible to tease out a number of distinct narrative strands: a young boy with a passion for geography grows up to lead an isolated life studying sea birds in the Arctic Circle; a young girl, much to her parents’ bafflement and dismay, drops out of college to become an activist; the most developed strand, set in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, involves an ambitious political adviser and her burgeoning relationship with a scientist whose projected climate models present a bleak picture for the future of the human race. These stories are interspersed with other characters, other voices, the most interesting being a pair of delegates from Mali. Together they present a less familiar picture, that of a country already feeling the real effects of climate change, encroaching deserts and disrupted rain patterns. But no sooner have they said their piece than they are ushered to one side in a way which could, optimistically, be read as a comment on the general media coverage of the issues at hand. Bijan Sheibani’s production is certainly slick. That’s not intended as a dig; the staging is always visually striking and there are moments of real invention and magic: the polar bear, the silhouettes of swooping circling guillemots. At other times there is a sense of excess and repetition: first plastic bottles fall from the ceiling, then paper, and finally both rain and wind machines get a work-out. Music is used throughout; there’s a brief burst of It’s Raining Men and a rather heavy-handed dance sequence to the strains of Come Fly With Me, presumably intended to illustrate the irony of all the air travel that an event like Copenhagen entails. The obvious parallel is with Rupert Goold’s Enron - and the production’s dramaturg is Goold’s regular collaborator Ben Power. Yet while the markers of the musical, the air of showiness, felt like a bombastic but logical choice for a play about banking and commerce, they feel somewhat shoe-horned in here. There are some strong individual performances, particularly from the ever-watchable Lyndsey Marshal, and there are also a number of moments of genuine humour, yet the overriding tone is didactic and clichéd - the strand with the young activist is particularly limp - and the whole thing has a stitched-together quality This is one of a growing wave of plays about climate change. Richard Bean’s The Heretic (chosen promotional image: the polar bear) at the Royal Court looks set to cover similar ground while Steve Waters’ potent double-bill, The Contingency Plan, has already shown that’s it’s possible to merge gripping and plausible writing with the idea of a threatened world. Here, while it’s possible to glean the thinking behind the exercise, the weight of all the voices serves to sink things. Reviewed for musicOMH

Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales at the Lyric

This staging of Roald Dahl’s often macabre short stories for adults has a fitting adapter in Jeremy Dyson, the non-performing member of the League of Gentleman and more latterly the writer of the sinister Funland for the BBC as well as Ghost Stories which premiered at the Lyric before transferring to the West End. Many of these stories, written in the 1950s before Dahl turned his hand to children’s fiction, were memorably filmed as Tales of the Unexpected. Among the five selected by Dyson are ‘William and Mary’, where a dying man’s brain is preserved in a jar, and ‘The Man from the South’, in which a sinister white-suited foreigner offers a young American a grotesque bet, one in which he gains a brand new Cadillac if he wins but forfeits a small part of his anatomy if he loses.

The latter is probably the most successfully executed with director Polly Findlay really piling on the tension (there’s some superb use of sound, a revelling in the scrape of a blade against wood). This stands in marked contrast to another of the stories in which an adulterous woman attempts to make some money by pawning an expensive mink. This section contains very little in the way of menace and suspense and the pay-off also lacks bite; this has the combined effect of making an 80 minute production feel suddenly sluggish. While its inclusion dose illustrate that not all Dahl’s tales were steeped in the grotesque and that some were about relatively normal betrayals, it seems an odd one to pick and rather sabotages the pacing of the piece. Dyson makes an attempt to contextualise all this ugliness and cruelty by concluding with 'Galloping Foxley', a story based on Dahl’s experiences of the humiliating fagging system at Repton and containing a toilet seat-warming episode that he would also recall in vivid detail in his memoir Boy . During his schooldays, small boys were regularly and vicioulsy beaten for the most minor offences, such as failing to toast bread correctly, and this clearly had a lasting effect on Dahl. This story is dragged from a different place to the others, coloured with memory and pain, something Findlay’s production is able to convey. These individual tales are linked togther in portmanteau fashion by a series of short scenes set on a train in which a voluble camel-coated commuter bombards his fellow travellers with the bizarre stories he’s heard. This device gives the production something of the feel of one of the Amicus anthology films that Dyson’s League collaborator Mark Gattiss recalled with evident affection in his recent BBC History of Horror. These linking scenes are not quite as taut as they might be and though they do serve to tie all these disparate stories together, it feels rather forced at times like roping animals together regardless of species. Naomi Wilkinson's design does however give the whole production a suitably noir-ish and cohesive feel The cast take on a number of roles apiece and Selina Griffiths stands out in this capacity, switching nimbly from sinister and bedraggled landlady to frosty 1950s wife. She is gifted with one of the production’s best executed scenes as the widowed Mary, her harsh and domineering husband now just a brain in a jar, a brain and a single staring eye. Mary’s steely smile as she relishes the potential of the situation is one of the most memorable moments in an otherwise slightly underwhelming and disjointed production. Reviewed for musicOMH

Less Than Kind at Jermyn Street Theatre

Terence Rattigan takes no less a play than Hamlet as his cue for this work of 1944, originally intended as a vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence. Commercial pressure led to it being hijacked by Broadway stars of the day, the Lunts - amusingly namechecked in the text - and it eventually emerged, in substantially altered form, as Love in Idleness. The original play, which has never before been staged as written, has been resurrected by Jermyn Street Theatre as part of the Rattigan centenary celebrations and in doing so the theatre has gained the jump on the Old Vic and the Theatre Royal Haymarket with their forthcoming productions of Cause Celebre and Flare Path.

In Less Than Kind Rattigan lifts the central premise from Shakespeare’s play and transplants it to wartime London. Society hostess Olivia Brown has neglected to tell her absent teenage son, Michael, that she is in a relationship with the government minister and noted industrialist Sir John Fletcher. In his years overseas, Michael has become an ardent socialist with an adolescent disinclination to compromise and when he returns home he is appalled to discover the truth of the situation – his mother has neglected to mention the matter in her letters – and immediately takes against Sir John. He can’t abide the man, both the fact that he’s still married and the couple are living quite contentedly in sin, and that, as a wealthy industrialist, he’s emblematic of all Michael claims to despise. He has no qualms about forcing his mother into an impossible choice between her son and her lover. At times the play seems overly pleased with itself as a literary exercise; Rattigan heavily underlines the Hamlet parallels, explicitly pointing out Michael’s antic disposition and making a joke out of his desire that Sir John accompany him to the theatre. The play is a far stronger piece of writing when it is being less overt, when it makes a genuine attempt to explore the emotional ramifications of the situation. The performances help to give necessary weight to Adrian Brown's production. Sara Crowe, as Olivia, is the heart of the piece, a woman who, having found not only a man whom she loves, but a social role at which she excels, is obliged to give it all up for a dingy flat in Baron’s Court. She accepts her situation with dignity and quiet resignation, and gives a sense of someone who is keen to make the best of things no matter what hand life deals her – even when it involves making one’s own powdered egg omelettes and learning to type. There is no sense of resentment towards her son, her love for him is undimmed, and there’s only the – perhaps too faint – trace of anger at her predicament. Facing up to Sir John’s younger, more effortlessly glamorous wife, Crowe combines a kind of scatty nobility with a fragile, faded quality. Michael Simkins is suitably charming as Sir John, a sheen that is maintained even when Rattigan allows Olivia to glimpse the lengths he’ll to which he’ll go to get what he wants. His love for her seems sincere and complete but there’s a slight edge of steel to him which is entirely appropriate to the character. There’s something more unnerving about David Osmond’s Michael with his righteousness and utter lack of concern for his mother’s happiness. There’s a chill to him, a subtle undercurrent of menace to his manipulation, qualities which Osmond’s performance draws out. While the play contains plenty of Rattigan's characteristic warmth and wit, it probably benefits greatly from the intimacy of a space like Jermyn Street Theatre. Exposed on a larger stage, the artifice and the occasional heavy-handedness of tone would be more glaring. This tiny venue is altogether kinder, allowing the play to be appreciated for what it is, not an unearthed masterwork but a piece of considerable interest nonetheless. Reviewed for musicOMH

Poetry Links

I have a piece in the new issue of Mslexia about the growing popularity of performance poetry and spoken word for which I had the pleasure of speaking to poets Kate Fox, Molly Naylor (both of whom had solo shows at last year's Edinburgh Fringe), Sabrina Mahfouz and Indigo Williams, about writing for the stage. It isn't online yet but it's there in the magazine in shiny black and white. On a not unrelated note my review of Luke Wright's latest (and possibly most ambitious) show, Cynical Ballads, is now up on musicOMH too.

Tiger Country at Hampstead Theatre

Perhaps more so than any other profession, the working lives of doctors and nurses (or, at least, a dramatically palatable version of them) have come to seem intimately familiar through long running television shows; the hospital politics, the medical language, even the expected emotional journeys - of the idealistic junior doctor, of the tough female surgeon – all have a ring of the habitual. Nina Raine attempts to defamiliarize these narratives by transferring them from screen to stage, but she only succeeds in part.

Of her large cast of characters only two really stand out. Ruth Everett, as Emily the young doctor whose hide has yet to toughen, and Thusitha Jayasundera as Vashti, the ball-breaking genitourinary surgeon, an Asian woman playing in a game still dominated by English men. The other characters remain sketches in comparison: the tough but not unkind SHO, the experienced doctor given a glimpse of his own mortality. Raine’s production, traverse staged across a sea of institutional blue linoleum, concentrates its energies on recreating the bustle of the hospital, from the fever of the incoming emergency and the precious lulls in between to the tightrope between levity and tension in the operating theatre and the sting of having to deliver bad news. As with her previous play for the Royal Court, Tribes, Raine’s research has clearly been considerable but the play doesn’t wear it too heavily. Even so, it’s evident in the surgical-medical rivalry and sniping, the carping about the poor CD selection in the operating theatre (“oh no, not All Woman again”) and, more generally, in the interplay between the characters’ sense of resignation and weariness with the thrill and passion that drove them to study medicine in the first place. At its best the writing is reminiscent of the television work of Jed Mercurio - doctor turned novelists and screenwriter - though in a more dilute form. Where the play truly lifts off is in the moments it hints at the things beyond the physical - the autonomic, the hunch in one’s guts, the hovering ghosts – and their necessary presence in the rational, medical world. In other places the drama is hamstrung by sheer overfamiliarity, never quite managing to reinvigorate situations that have been played out nightly on the BBC. Raine is in no way blind to this and even milks the ironies, showing a doctor unwinding after a night shift by flopping, beer in hand, in front of Doctors, (a show that must by now outrank The Bill on most actors CVs, including many of the cast). Everett and Jayasundera strike the right notes with their respective roles and the ensemble playing is strong throughout. When Raine uses the potential of the stage to fracture the action, to make the audience look between and beyond the things they think they know (a stroke patient, dazed and dysphasic, is puzzled by the uncanny congregation around her, the sea of staring faces) then the production has real power, but this happens only intermittently and the lack of strongly defined characters does begin to become an issue as the play progresses. Emily, confronted with the reality that she can’t save everyone as well as the growing understanding that if she becomes emotionally overinvested in every single case she will eventually burn herself out, duly toughens up while Vashti, her aunt ill following surgical incompetence, questions both herself and her priorities; none of the other characters is given much room to evolve and the result, in terms of narrative focus, is something like a photograph of a fast-moving object. Reviewed for musicOMH

The Painter at the Arcola

For JMW Turner light was all. His paintings are luminous; they shimmer with the glory of the sunlit sea, they emanate heat. In Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play about his life, his genius is the solid thing at the centre of the text, while Turner the man is far more opaque.

Having been obliged to leave their former home, the Arcola has moved to new premises in a converted paint factory on Ashwin Street. This raw, unfinished space doubles well as Turner’s studio and the atmosphere of the place counts for much in a production that sometimes seems to walk on tiptoe, its tread uncertain.

In choosing Turner as her subject, Lenkiewicz has to grapple with a familiar dilemma. How does one go about showing creative genius on stage? Take away the work and what remains? Though the son of a barber, Turner is utterly assured of his own abilities and seems to relish his role as an outsider. He speaks with mild disdain of the Royal Academy ("English painting is dead") and the ‘fashionables’ but certainly does not suffer from self-doubt; he seems quite certain that his work will live on after him yet Lenkiewicz shows him to be far less capable in his relations with other people, particularly women.

His companion, closest friend and studio assistant is his father; his mother, having lost a daughter in infancy, is gradually unravelling. She resents Turner for having survived to adulthood and though her venom seems a symptom of greater ailment, it is clear her comments cut him.  

As Turner, Toby Jones gives a strong, subtle performance, but an essentially reactive one. As played, Turner is a man who gives little away. He accepts things as they come to him and the drive he shows as an artist does not seem to translate into his personal life. He seems genuinely fond of Jenny, the prostitute who becomes the model for a series of anatomical studies, but he even terminates this relationship at the behest of his widowed neighbour, Sarah, with whom he is having a child. He builds a bond with Jenny’s young son but casts him aside too. There seems no malice in his actions; he just does as he is bidden. Denise Gough is superb as this brittle young Jenny; her love for her young son is palpable and she gives a sense that she grasps Turner’s emotional limitations far better than the other women in his life.

Amanda Boxer impresses as his distressed and volatile mother, terrified of the asylum, while Jim Bywater and Jones have an understated rapport as father and son – there is a strong sense of men familiar with each other’s habits, able to communicate without words. Niamh Cusack (who recently played another emotionally ostracised woman, Catherine Dickens, in Out of Joint’s otherwise patchy Andersen’s English) is a mix of calculation and resignation as the widow who desires Turner but knows he will not love her in return.

The play is episodic in structure and takes the form of a collection of short scenes, nicely handled individually but lacking in bite. Lenkiewucz mingles snippets of Turner’s home life with speeches drawn from his lectures to the Royal Academy and, in its fragmentary way, the play gives the audience a sense of Turner. However, having picked as a subject a man so distant, Lenkiewicz has penned herself in. He is both a presence and absence at the centre of the play and, though her writing contains - as ever - moments of lyricism, Turner's remoteness inevitably has an impact on the play’s power.

The Potting Shed at the Finborough Theatre

Like Cold Comfort Farm’s Aunt Ada Doom, Graham Greene’s infrequently performed play is preoccupied by something dark at the bottom of the garden. The play has not been seen on a London stage in forty years and, on watching it, it’s possible to grasp why this has been the case. Greene’s fixation with issues of faith and the rather ponderous way in which the play unfolds root it squarely in the past; however as a counterpoint to his work as a novelist, if only to illustrate that what works well on paper doesn’t always translate to the stage, it is an intriguing piece.

In the play Greene returns to a familiar theme: the answered prayer. The Callifer patriarch, a renowned rationalist and chum of Bertrand Russell, is on his death bed and his friends and family have been summoned to his side – with the exception of his son James who has been all but ostracised from family life following a mysterious incident in the potting shed when he was a boy. The first half of the play is concerned with the now middle-aged James’ desire to discover just what happened to him and why it has so split the family (an uncle who became a Catholic priest has also been painted out of the picture). While the play contains some pleasingly crisp lines of dialogue, the plotting is repetitive with James continually pleading with his mother to tell him what happened – for he has no memory of the event, no memory of his childhood at all – and her continually refusing to bend. Eventually, with the help of his inquisitive niece, James is able to track down his uncle and discover the cause of the family rift; the play hinges on this moment of revelation and the scene between James and his uncle is the strongest in the play. But it takes an age to get there; there’s a stiff quality to the early scenes and while Greene does appear to have tried to build a sense of tension and mystery, it doesn’t quite come off. Svetlana Dimcovic’s production for the Finborough is solidly staged and draws some strong performances from the cast. Paul Cawley, as James, slowly develops from the passive and baffled man of the opening scenes, through methedrine-fuelled desperation to dig up the truth, to a kind of contentment. Martin Wimbush, in his brief turn as the whisky-sodden Father William Callifer is also impressive, giving a sense of man who has lost some vital part of his himself, and Zoe Thorne is appealing as Anne, James’ young niece whose openness stands in marked contrast to her family’s tendency to bury the things they find disagreeable. The main hurdle, which this revival can’t quite get over, is the crux of the play itself. Greene’s depiction of faith and its loss, the literalness of it, feels heavy-handed and forced on the stage; to contemporary eyes there is even the danger of it appearing daft. Interestingly, with the exception of Anne and perhaps also of Father William, the characters simply don’t take shape in the same manner as the characters of his novels do; they seem flat in comparison, despite being stood there in front of the audience. That said, the play has an appealing oddness about it and as a thing of its time and for those who know Greene's work well, it is of real interest, particularly in the way it echoes themes from his novels.  Reviewed for musicOMH