COCOA. To 5 May.

London

COCOA
by George Gotts

Theatre 503 Latchmere Pub 503 Battersea Park Road SW11 3BW To 5 May 2007
Tue-Sat 8pm Sun 5pm
Runs 1hr No interval

TICKETS: 020 7978 7040
www.theatre503.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 April

Mystery on the moors sustains its inward tensions.
Cocoa’s a cosy-sounding drink, a family nightcap, sweetly comforting. At least till George Gotts gets her hands (for George is a she) on it. It may be a distant descent but this play is in a line from the late 60s/early 70s homecoming dramas, where grown-up offspring return with expeerience of a wider world to the tight ghetto of family life.

The most famous, if least typical, of these was Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming and Gotts has more in common with Pinter’s sense of the undefined and disturbing than with the reasoned-out arguments of other examples as Charlotte returns from her London job for a quick weekend with mother Mary and step-dad Reg on the Yorkshire Moors.

The strangeness begins early, awaiting Charlotte’s overdue arrival. The snack-food Mary’s bought from the supermarket’s Entertaining shelf is unidentifiable to her or Reg. Then there’s a mysterious animal Charlotte hit on her journey, a fur-deprived cat hiding under a bed, the impact of mysterious reflections in mirror or windscreen.

Charlotte’s arrival brings news of her future, but along with this there’s her present to Reg, a tin of cocoa. It’s from her new world, bought at Harrods, but also springs open doubts and fears from the past.

Amid these named characters there’s the Girl, a teenager who may be to Charlotte what the Red Room’s occupant became to the heroine in Shared Experience’s Jane Eyre; an emanation of the suppressed wild side. In a play with so many accounts of reflections, this Girl claims to have observed Charlotte’s reluctance to travel home through the window of a motorway service-area. And she’s first seen in fancy-dress as a fiery cat.

This style is a dangerous game to play, but Gotts mixes allusion and reality carefully, unsettling the routine of the older generation, boxed in their cottage (Alex Eales emphasising the confinement with his raised box-set). Chris White’s well-acted production keeps the audience intrigued as Gotts’ combination of definite objects and indefinite implications shows how separate lives that are lived close together can be, and what unlikely events may lie behind a calm-seeming present.

Girl: Jessica Harris
Mary: Eliza Hunt
Reg: Peter Sproule
Charlotte: Madeleine Worrall

Director: Chris White
Designer: Alex Eales
Lighting: Michael Nabarro
Sound: Phil Hewitt

2007-04-23 07:20:18