2nd MAY 1997 To 31 October.
London/Tour.
2ND MAY 1997
by Jack Thorne.
Bush Theatre Shepherds Bush Green W12 8QD To 10 October 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30 Mat Sats2.30pm.
Audio-described 22 Sept.
Captioned 23 Sept.
Runs 1hr 30min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 8743 5050.
www.bushtheatre.co.uk (Bush performances).
Review: by Carole Woddis 14 September.
Personal lives from political sides in impressive production.
Playwright Jack Thorne is a rising star. So too fellow writer Laura Wade. Thorne has dedicated his latest to Wade. What does this tell us? Something “spicey but macabre”, as I once wrote about Wade’s Breathing Corpses? Wade has a penchant for writing about death. Thorne, whose previous plays Stacy and When You Cure Me both featured the traumatic consequences of rape, obliquely refers to both a death and a possible unspecified horrific occurrence, though the references are deliberately ambiguous.
I doubt we’ll ever know the true reason for the dedication. Just another peripheral conundrum to a piece whose title already sets up misleading assumptions. 2nd May 1997 is no political treatise on the New Labour landslide. Instead Thorne gives three personal vignettes, one from each of the main political parties, that comment on the aftermath of seismic national events but more interestingly show how, to an extent, these events are side-shows in our own lives.
In two of the three - a minor Tory cabinet member and his wife contemplating post-Armageddon life and at the other end of the spectrum, the New Labour victory inspiring two north of England `A’ level schoolboys to feel freshly empowered - the consequences are perhaps predictable, although Thorne throws in enough subtleties, regrets, red herrings and underlying homosexual yearnings to keep us intrigued.
In between – and I suspect it is this section that will grab most attention – we encounter Sarah and Ian. There has been no more stunning display of damaged sexuality than Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Sarah. Strikingly tall, mini-skirted, Waller-Bridge, forced into playing half her scene topless, creates a walking minefield, a young woman running away from the anniversary of a horribly painful death. Wandering into a Lib-Dem election night party, the only clue we have to her subsequent self-destructive behaviour is one line: “She was all the world to me.”
To an extent, Thorne is playing games with us. But beautifully, tenderly directed in a traverse staging by George Perrin, artistic director of nabokov, the production’s co-producer, and superbly acted by veterans and debutants alike, this is an outstanding compelling 90 minutes.
Jake: James Barrett.
Robert: Geoffrey Beevers.
Marie: Linda Broughton.
Will: Jamie Samuel.
Ian: Hugh Skinner.
Sarah: Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Director: George Perrin.
Designer: Hannah Clark.
Lighting: Philip Gladwell.
Sound: Emma Laxton.
Assistant director: Joe Murphy.
Movement: Kate Sagovsky
Assistant lighting/Tour re-lighter: Anna Eveleigh.
2009-09-16 01:08:28