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Author
John Donnelly
Director
Femi Elufowoju
Jr
Design
Ultz
Performer
Brid Brennan
Bryan Dick
Don Gilet
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Royal
Court Theatre
9th
- 25th September 2004 |
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Three
monologues, which only become
dialogue at one brief moment,
reveal three lives at moments
of crisis; and in revealing
them at those moments, they
say a great deal about those
lives, and their times: which
are our times.
Helen is grieving her husband,
dead of a heart attack just
a week beforehand, and their
flock of sheep killed and
burned in the foot and mouth
crisis, something that precipitated
the heart attack and now Helens
heartache and planned suicide.
The woman Stephen loves has
married someone else, and
he cannot get over it. Full
of anger and dismay, he dreams
of exploding a hand grenade
in his office, and later,
after getting drunk and vomiting
down his front, and experiencing
the sudden kindness of a stranger,
finds himself standing on
the parapet of London Bridge,
looking down into the dark
water and contemplating death.
Jamie is young, inflammably
angry because a foreigner
raped his sister, and is off
to the army the next day and
wants to get laid before he
goes. At the slightest provocation
he is ready with his fists,
and even his friends begin
to back away from the rage
and confusion within.
The monologues twine in and
out, building the three separate
but jointly composite pictures
pixel by pixel, each voice
utterly distinct and beautifully
realised by John Donnelly,
who has a great gift: the
ability to occupy and sympathise
with internal perspectives
that are not only very different
from one another but are so
because of their deep inner
complexity. The writing is
very good indeed; and the
cast responds with some powerful,
moving, upsetting, sometimes
funny but always bitterly
truthful acting.
There is a treasury of talent
in contemporary British theatre,
and it is not only about the
techniques and mechanics of
the theatrical arts. It is
about philosophical insight
too, and sociological acuity:
which makes new theatre like
this deserve the epithet brilliant.
AC Grayling |
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