EYES CATCH FIRE. To 26 June.
London
EYES CATCH FIRE
by Jason Hall
Finborough Theatre To 26 June 2004
Tue-Sat 8.30pm Sun 4.30pm
Runs 1hr 20min No interval
TICKETS: 020 7373 3842
www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 13 June
Gripping cross-continent What's In A Name? drama.This is a tragedy of love. And of a secret. It opens with two sisters freezing in Toronto, trying to enjoy a cigarette outside a no-smoking home. It ends with one of them having another cigarette, lit by her teenage self from back home in South American Guyana. Over time, Jason Hall explains why the women's mother can't abide one of them. Hall knows how to structure a play, making plot and character tensions carry maximum emotional impact and reveal complexities in human nature.
It is another play about guilt, but one with an unusual story, theatrical verve and emotional truth, caught in a clutch of understanding, adroit performances. The opening conversation is interrupted by increasingly frenzied knocking, climaxing in Mary's younger self emerging like an insistent chrysalis breaking open. But this is no new birth. Mary's locked up in herself, unable to tell her mother why she hasn't passed on the family name Daniel to her son.
Until she can express the truth, she's fated to be pursued by her 15-year old self. It's a matter of voicing responsibility to the family women who regard her as a victim, explaining what led to a fateful male encounter.
Despite good work from the two performers, Hall never quite integrates the characters of Willomena or Sandra into the action though the difference between Carla Du Bois' bright-skirted happiness in hot Guyana and fur-wrapped enclosure in freezing Toronto gives a strong picture of dislocation.
Atesh Salih and Alexander Lanipekun are well-contrasted as brother and lover, while Ursula Mohan is outstanding as the mother inclined always to blame her earnest daughter Millie for trouble. Diana Larsen's is the only character who is not more intense in Canada, something hard to imagine having seen her politically committed earlier self.
After a few moments of over-stressed anxiety near the opening, Maria Corcobado settles into a fine duality with Kate Burdette's impressionable younger self (there's a telling moment where young Kate takes up smoking, linking her older self's opening and closing anxiety cigarettes) in a fine drama that deserves to be seen far more widely.
Mary (28): Maria Corcobado
Millie: Diana Larsen
Sandra: Carla Du Bois
Carla Mummy Caldiera: Ursula Mohan
Mary (15): Kate Burdette
Daniel: Atesh Salih
Willomena: Naomi Taylor
Earnest: Alexander Lanipekun
Director: Daniel Nyman
Designer: Kathryn Nicholson
Lighting: James Smith
2004-06-14 16:04:37