BELLA AND THE BEAUTIFUL KNIGHT. To 27 May.

Tour

BELLA AND THE BEAUTIFUL KNIGHT
by Oliver Emanuel

Silver Tongue Theatre Tour to 27 May 2006
Runs 1hr 10min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 May at Old Town Hall Hemel Hempstead

Fantasy and realism skilfully intertwine.
Drama often deals with enclosed minds and hermetic relationships. Exactly how the brother/sister household of Donny and Bella came about only emerges at the end of Oliver Emanuel’s play. It’s an awful answer to the gunpoint demand for truth in the brief opening scene.

All the scenes are brief, marked out in Daniel Bye’s production (Emmanuel and Bye are founder writer and director of Leeds-based Silver Tongue Theatre) by harsh camera-shutter sounds and varied, often localised lighting creating a series of snapshot images, a family photo album revealing a relationship, an obsession and, ultimately, a secret.

For Donny, cradling his rifle, home is a Scottish man’s castle, to be protected from local youths or the boyfriend sister Bella brings home. Though she’s slow to see it, his fortress is her prison. It began in childhood as he calmed her fear of the dark with stories of a fairy-tale Bella rescued from danger. In adulthood, their parents dead, the guardian becomes a warder, an agoraphobic whose only external voyages are to scare teenagers from the adjacent cemetery.

Bella might have day-release to work, but doesn’t at first see how Donny needs her to himself. It’s a subtle revelation – the protector who is protecting himself. He spends his days apparently composing fantasy stories that seem to go nowhere. And cutting out air-mile coupons from magazines, for journeys he’ll never take.

It’s the coming of smart, sensible boyfriend Philip that brings realisation to Bella. Donny creates a modern equivalent of knightly challenges for this suitor who threatens to deprive him of his sister. There’s an aptness to Donny’s use of draughts as a game, rather than the really smart chess. And Philip neatly turns the traditional challenge of questions a suitor must answer against Donny.

In this richly compact piece Sally Kent as a Bella who wants to live her life, not be a fairytale princess, shows the awakening realisation of her brother’s ways, while Nicholas Cowell is upright good-sense incarnate. Grae Cleugh’s Donny is a mixed-up mess of aggressive defence and childishly gleeful command, the play’s motor and his own ultimate victim.

Donny: Grae Cleugh
Bella: Sally Kent
Philip: Nicholas Cowell

Director: Daniel Bye
Designer: Barney George
Lighting: Ben Pacey
Sound: Leon Marks

2006-05-20 12:03:41