DUST AT MIDNIGHT. White Bear to 17 February.

London

DUST AT MIDNIGHT
by Linda Wilkinson

White Bear Theatre To 17 February 2002
Runs 1hr 10min No interval

TICKETS 020 7793 9193
Review Timothy Ramsden 3 February

A new company and playwright with an interesting take on familiar dramatic devices.This is the first production by a new group, Women in Theatre. They could hardly have found a better venue than this busy laboratory of the new and adventurous in South London's Kennington.

Playwright Linda Wilkinson has been a research scientist and is Chair of Amnesty International UK so should have a lot to write about. Her first play limits itself to sex, madness and Tennessee Williams. The dead playwright hacks into struggling writer Jo's laptop with unpublished erotica and an unsettling effect on her relationship with partner Sally.

Why has the great departed honed in on South London Jo, a writer whose speech shows peculiar antipathy to the 't' sound? The link lies in what becomes a not so suppressed guilt over the treatment of a close relative. Williams famously agonised over his lobotomised sister while Jo cannot clear from her conscience the aunt her family ejected years before.

There's something mechanistic in the characters; Sally's business background is off the peg, while Jo's dad Jim has an insensitivity reflected in his knack with the plumbing. Nor is it clear how much of a writer Jo will ever become. But Wilkinson makes her own the familiar dramatic device of an unlikely sympathy and support between old and young, not to mention the problematic idea of a ghost as adviser to a troubled soul. Strangely, old Tennessee in south London seems the most accustomed and natural character of the quartet.

She's helped in this by likeable performances from Olivier and, especially, Benedict who maintains an otherworldly intensity in his gaze on human happenings. Having sorted out most of the dilemmas – we don't discover how the risk of a rift between Jo and Sally is to turn out – the ghost knows when to get out of the machine

The play could easily become maudlin but the balance of fear and hope in Jo develops interestingly in the writing and the pace never flags in Michael Kingsbury's fluid production, its eventual dip into the guilty past particularly forceful.

Jo: Julie-Kate Olivier
Tennessee Williams: Jay Benedict
Sally: Leigh McDonald
Jim: Ric Morgan

Director: Michael Kingsbury
Designer: Sigyn Stenquist
Lighting: Adam Crossthwaite
Sound: Peter Russell

2002-02-04 15:06:04