I'LL BE BACK BEFORE MIDNIGHT. To 12 July.
Oldham
I'LL BE BACK BEFORE MIDNIGHT!
by Peter Colley
Coliseum Theatre To 12 July 2003
Tue-Thu, Sat 7.30pm Fri 8pm Mat 5,12 July 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval
TICKETS: 0161 624 2829
Review: Timothy Ramsden 20 June
'Yes' to the play; perhaps' to the production.Stage thrillers rarely thrill. Compared with cinema, their attempts at technical shocks and surprises are creaky. Theatre throws emphasis on the actor, and therefore on character. Plot-based thrillers need restricted individuality, which easily seems false in the theatre.
Novels leave scope for reader imagination to fill in a sense of reality; cinema creates it with background and location, plus swift cutting to some other part of the chase when things might get dodgy.
Theatre also destroyed the genre's credibility from within. Socially, the middle-class world of nasty things with an ultimate logical explanation depended upon a cosy audience consensus which became increasingly unstable. And the great leap forward Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth - produced a focus on games-playing, and consequent audience rug-pulling, which became confirmed as the way ahead in such successful followers as Ira Levin's Deathtrap and The Business of Murder.
Attempts to establish character-based thrillers have lead to cardboard cut-out motivation and vapid roles which actors try desperately to give a third-dimension, much harder to inject into a script on stage than on screen especially when so often they're commercial tours led by TV-famed performers.
So it's lovely to meet again Canadian Peter Colley's resourceful thriller, which provides a generous helping of sheer visceral thrills never over-ladling them but, just when you think they're over, coming back with more. Things go bump in the night and worse often enough around this farmhouse, made remote by the victim's nervous fragility.
Colley also has a satisfactory response to the problem that plotters as long ago as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers used every possibility of villain. He doesn't cheat on narrative (though he relies on Directory Enquiries being unusually responsive).
John Adams' direction gives us moment-by-moment excitement. But the comedy essential alongside tightening plot screws should emerge naturally, through reticence in acting. By shoving a battery of shock-moments at us early on, and making frenzied shouting the only resource when tension tightens, the production invites laughs that aren't pure nervous release. Pacing goes awry: some characters signal strange' and sinister' rather than let them creep up on us. But Colley's play remains a creepy night out.
George: Andy Abrahams
Jan: Vashti MacLachlan
Greg: James Nickerson
Laura: Laura Richmond
Director: John Adams
Designer: Janet Bird
Lighting: Phil Davies
Sound: Anna Holly, Daniel Ogden
Fight director: Renny Krupinski
2003-06-23 00:12:55