MARKINGS To 12 June.

London/Tour

MARKINGS
by Dominic Francis

Southwark Playhouse To 20 March then tour 12May-12 June 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 20 March 3pm
After-show discussion: 17 March
Runs 1hr 50min One interval

TICKETS: 020 7620 3494 (Southwark Playhouse)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 8 March

A well-portrayed world where women suffer and sour while the men in the family long for lives of their own.Here's British theatre doing what it's done so well so long. Realism - despite the time switches and occasional simultaneous existence of 1940s and present-day characters on stage. Dominic Francis establishes this non-naturalistic element at the start, Cecil calling to someone on the coast of 1942 Northern Ireland while Edward's trying to make his mobile work around 2004 Morecambe Bay. Just as in the plot's most stretched element - Edward feels his grandfather's presence around him, so these effortful attempts at communication share an eventually evident common thread.

Edward's trek with his mother Annie across the treacherous bleakness of Morecambe Bay (scene, after the play was written, of the death of migrant cockle-pickers), their loss of way and need for rescue, reflect their relationship's emotional quagmire.

It refers back to their forebears, Cecil and Beattie, who in 1945 is pregnant with Annie. Between 1942 when we first meet her, Ruth Gibson's happy, lively Beattie, toughens into the hard-eyed determination which will see her through life after her husband deserts her for a love that would rather not speak its name.

Little's changed when their grandson Edward returns home in 2004. There's still emotional frustration, an inability to communicate or comprehend feelings on the remorseless edge of the sea. Partners and parents are the hardest people to speak to; others' emotional needs are revealed only in difficult fragments.

It's a slow-paced plot-fuse, well-handled as Tamara Harvey's production for Attic Theatre constructs the family web, clear-etched characters emerging before their inner attachment are made evident. Both men touch the edge of credibility at moments of high feeling, but make convincing the concealed drive unsteadying their relationship with the women.

And Jenny Lee makes her worried, anger-stoked daughter sympathetic if offputting, in her widowed late fifties. Unhappy with both her son's father poor but kind and memories of her own, Cecil (who leaves Beattie when she's discovered his secret life), there's an emotional desert stored inside her, only finally finding a resolution. The emotional markings last for life in a drama which slowly tightens its grip while gradually revealing its secrets.

Cecil: Dean Ashton
Edward: Simon Muller
Annie: Jenny Lee
Beattie: Ruth Gibson

Director: Tamara Harvey
Designer: Janet Bird
Lighting: Emma Chapman
Sound: Ben Evans

2004-03-09 04:30:10