CROOKED. To 3 June.

London

CROOKED
by Catherine Trieschmann

Bush Theatre To 3 June 2006
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 3pm
Runs 1hr 30min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7610 4224
www.bushtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 May

Concentrated crucible of human emotions scrupulously portrayed.
Some plays cover the world; others, like Catherine Trieschmann’s, illuminate an insignificant-seeming corner. Its two teenage girls and one mother, are as straightforward a trio as you’d find in small-town America. That is, twisted as anyone by experience, but with no great quality to make them stand out so as anyone’d notice.

Back in Mississippi from a broken marriage in Wisconsin, Elise’s life is on-hold, her liberal intelligence idling in the deep south, unemployed or with a job that disgusts her before she begins. But life bubbles chemically inside 14-year old daughter Laney, blaming mom they’re separated from dad (the reason for the split emerges, making her anger at her mother logically unreasonable but more psychologically keen) and taking up in high school with 16-year old Maribel.

They meet, by chance or Laney’s design, in the high-school stadium, where Maribel’s tucking illegally into lunch. These outsiders talk of popularity, an undercurrent of sexual naivety seeping in as the younger, yet more sophisticated, story-writing Laney latches onto Maribel and her simplistic beliefs in what she calls holiness lesbianism. It’s a stick to beat mom with, though the hit’s less the sex angle (Elise must know about these phases) than that she’s ditching the parental atheism for Maribel’s cosy faith, learned from her part-time preacher, part-time second-hand car-dealer father.

There’s a whiff of once-popular Bush American playwright Beth Henley about this world, but Trieschmann follows her own path. Her young characters are marked out physically, whether or not the muscles creating Laney’s sloping shoulder will sort themselves out as she says, or whether this is unlikely as Maribel’s girth being the mere puppy-fat she calls it.

Debbie Chazen’s child-voiced, rosy-cheeked innocence contrasts Amanda Hale’s remarkable Laney, adolescent emotion surging out in sudden intense facial expressions as deep tones flood her voice. Suzan Sylvester’s finely-inflected performance catches an intelligent mother’s care, anger and weariness. Such material receives the scrupulous, penetrating and restrained oversight for which the technical term is Mike Bradwell, while Libby Watson’s scrubbed-wood minimal set matches the play’s world, its slight receding perspective framing the action in its own crooked lines.

Laney Waters: Amanda Hale
Elise Waters: Suzan Sylvester
Maribel Purdy: Debbie Chazen

Director: Mike Bradwell
Designer: Libby Watson
Lighting: James Farncombe
Sound: Nick Manning
Assistant director: Des Kennedy

2006-05-16 11:16:07