BONES. To 4 November.

London

BONES
by Kay Adshead

Bush Theatre To 4 November 2006
Mon-Sat 8pm
Runs 1hr 25min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7610 4224
www.bushtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 October

Traditional guilt and revelation neatly handled, but a drama of yesteryear..
Once again Kay Adshead wears her liberal heart bleeding on her dramatic sleeve. As with The Bogus Woman the attitude to the issue is admirable, the dramatic working-out so uni-dimensional it easily causes rejection. The earlier play was an asylum-seeker’s uncontested pleading; here the delving back into the past evils of apartheid provokes the question why this old issue, so frequently explored when it was live, should form a whole play now.

Since then there’s been Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If not a perfect solution – what could be to the drawn-out fascism of apartheid South Africa? – it was a still brilliant, progressive move. In South Africa’s post-apartheid problems: AIDS, rural violence, failure to influence neighbouring Zimbabwe’s plight, a whole play devoted to a white woman’s guilt hangover, some specious stuff about mystic powers and the hardly novel revelation that White apartheid policemen beat innocent Black people to death (remember Steve Biko?) during off-duty hours, is thin cause for a play in 2006.

After Dirk de Viliers’ Christine at New End recently – an apartheid play that handled a promising idea with excruciating ineptness - Bones brings more skill to a play that’s neat, but never necessary. The one intriguing idea it holds is never developed: that suffering afflicts the good and evildoers alike and that one person’s suffering can be intense for them while on a completely separate plane from the agonies of others.

Adshead explains the play’s origins in relation to specific actors. She correctly says Pauline Moran plays the white wife of a policeman dying from a brain tumour as if it was written for here, though it wasn’t (the intended performer died of cancer). If anything, she understates the strength of Sarah Niles as Beauty, the smiling Black servant who reveals a side as sharp as, and darker than, her famously bright teeth. Niles’s simplicity contains more cunning than her employer can understand and she takes on vivid physical and vocal transformations in expressing her complexity.

An honourable act towards the writer’s colleagues, Bones makes only a partially successful transition to wider audiences.

Jennifer: Pauline Moran
Boy/Beauty: Sarah Niles
Drummer: Joe Legwabe

Director: Kay Adshead
Design concept: Mama Quillo
Lighting: Lizzie Powell
Sound: Sarah Weltman, Matt Berry
Assistant director: Liz Gladwin

2006-10-31 00:57:21