BLACKBIRD. To 14 June.

Tour.

BLACKBIRD
by David Harrower.

Tour to 14 June 2008.
Runs 1hr 35min No interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 22 April at Oxford Playhouse.

Striking, agitated drama of dark clouds hanging over people’s pasts.
A man and a woman argue in an anonymous office, surrounded by the day’s detritus of plastic bottles and crisp packets overflowing the waste-bin and scattered round the room. Outside an occasional figure’s seen through frosty glass. But soon they’re alone. One traumatic event, from years before, has led the woman, who knew him under a different name, to come here.

The lights go out, scaring the 20-something female. The man, in his mid-fifties, is less alarmed. He knows the place. Yet the darkness leads to another of his secrets spilling out.

At the play’s 2005 Edinburgh premiere, directed by Peter Stein, Blackbird ran two hours, partly owing to an epilogue added by the director, and now helpfully cut. But it’s also a sign the playing here is plainer, as Grindley lets the trauma unroll between two people who it becomes clear have neither thrown off the emotional impact of their 15-year past liaison.

Playwright David Harrower isn't primarily dealing with criminal activities involving adult and child. As Robert Daws and Dawn Steele’s different agitation makes clear, there was trust and involvement on both sides, though Una’s account of her feelings when she believed herself abandoned shows the confusion in a child’s trusting mind.

That trust has been curdled by years of adult understanding of physical and emotional hurt. It’s seen in anger and violence, yet also in a quiet intensity of recall, and a sudden reversion to childhood feelings.

Ray has struggled to regain a life for himself after an episode which he brought to an end. A sudden, late appearance raises questions about him in Una’s mind, even as she’s recovering from her passionate outburst. This moment of childlike innocence and trust must smash her in the face after all that’s been revealed.

Harrower maps the impact of a brief intense liaison over years of two people’s lives in acute detail. Grindley lets Daws spend too long head-in-hands to register his reactions to Una’s main recollection, but Dawn Steele gives her speech a thought-through intensity that makes a night by the seaside seem a premature voyage of life-experience.

Ray: Robert Daws.
Una: Dawn Steele.
Girl: Holly Tremellen/Bridie Sheppard.
with: Grahame Edwards, Marianne McIvor.

Director: David Grindley.
Designer/Costume: Jonathan Fensom.
Lighting: Jason Taylor.
Sound: Gregory Clarke.
Fight director: Paul Benzing.

2008-04-23 01:05:39