DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES. To 31 October.
Keswick.
DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
by J P Miller new version by Owen McCafferty.
Theatre By The Lake In rep to 31 October 2007.
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat 4 Sept 2pm.
Runs hr 45min No interval.
TICKETS: 017687 74411.
www.theatrebythelake.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 August.
Cracking performances of lives cracking up.
There’s a neat triangulation to Keswick’s 2007 studio shows. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? links in its exploration of love and desire and hate with David Eldridge’s Under the Blue Sky, while its heavy-drinking pours over into Owen McCafferty’s drama, from J P Miller’s story.
Relocated to London, McCafferty’s two-hander shows a pair of Belfast people meeting as they fly to England. His smart dress and manner suggest a stockbroker, though he’s a bookie’s clerk, taking the odd swig from a hip-flask. She’s a naïve, impulsive youngster who’s never tried alcohol before.
It’s soon threatening their lives. Drinking’s part of the racecourse lifestyle for Donal while Mona declares boredom drives her to it. But that hardly explains why he fights back while she spirals downwards into the misty dream of her alcoholic haze.
Yet if these snapshot-scenes covering some six-years of desperate marriage leave questions unexplored, the what of addiction’s starkly evident as, it’s implied, a neighbour takes their son in, and Mona descends to a sleazy bedsit and prostitution to fund her spirits-world.
The pair fight, or end an all-night bender helpless on the floor. He speaks to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, a scene given poignancy as she stands behind the earnest confessional, draining his hip-flask.
Unfortunately, Stefan Escreet’s production has the actors miming song-tracks between scenes. It’s self-consciously theatrical in a piece where the truth of these performances are what stab home. But there’s a fitting sense of lives on the edge as their suitcases become the repository for all the properties. This is a world where a home is wrecked, and a child’s teddy lies bent as if it’s lost control of its limbs.
Richard Galazka’s Donal goes through purgatory, dragging his unwilling, sozzled body, his face registering pain and puzzlement at the lowest moments. But it’s Allie Croker’s Mona who goes to Hell-on-Earth, the initial bounding joy of youthful physicality collapsing into ungainly angles, the happy face hardening. Even the hair seems to become flaccid and dry, till she ends up bent and agonised, pleased she can claim three days off the bottle. A blistering experience.
Mona: Allie Croker.
Donal: Richard Galazka.
Director: Strefan Escreet.
Designer: Sakina Karimjee.
Lighting: Andrew J Lindsay.
Sound: Matt Hall.
Dialect coach: Charmian Hoare.
2007-08-29 11:22:52