COLD COMFORT. To 3 June.

London

COLD COMFORT
by Owen McCafferty

Theatre 503 Latchmere Pub 503 Battersea Park Road SW11 3BW To 3 June 2006
Mon-Sat 8pm
Runs 1hr 20min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7978 7040
www.theatre503.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 May 2006

Minor McCafferty; major Kane.
“Fuck,” says drunken Kevin several times; it’s his first and last word to his dead father, whose death he’s returned to ‘celebrate’ in Belfast from work as a brickie around Kilburn. Between times, we travel beneath this offensive, defensive surface of a man with a whiskey bottle on a bench in his shabby, though not scruffy, suit. He is someone who tried to be something but has ended up like a Godot tramp shoved in the gutter.

Elegant words of religious consolation for bereavement, neatly typed, cover the wall and floor around the disorderly Kevin. A patch of white light picks out his bench (where he spends the first half of the play) amid a red glow that gradually changes to colder light as he inhabits the wider space, Tina McHugh’s lighting suggesting a coffin-like confinement amid a neon glow and a colder daylight illumination.

Kevin has abandoned, or been abandoned by, just about all his family. Father’s death is just the last, and least intentional, stage of this. Parents, wife, children; all – himself included – have flown any family connection. The very last of these separations to be described is the most awful, combining destructiveness with Kevin’s attempt at love. Unfortunately, it’s a moment that dunks the story in melodrama, because it arrives as a theatrical climax, jarringly at odds with the wider experiences told so far.

Patrick O’Kane handles it well, kneeled and leaning back, mouth open in agonised recall. It‘s only spoiled by the loud, pained cries that plunge the moment from human grief into actor-lab exercises. Stronger is the hunched crouch into which the memory takes him, the fingers of one hand working at his head before the hand slumps to the floor.

O’Kane’s an emphatic actor, in some roles overly so. Here, the drink soaks up any potential excess, while the realistic slurrings and elisions always leave key points clearly articulated in a performance of carefully graduated pace, dynamics and tone. Whatever there is of Kevin to know, O’Kane makes sure we see.

Kevin Toner: Patrick O’Kane

Director: Owen McCafferty
Designer: David Craig
Lighting: Tina McHugh
Assistant designer: Paula McCafferty

2006-05-24 09:18:55