MIRITA In rep to 30 March.

London

MIRITA
by Chris Dunkley

Blue Box Theatre Company at the Finborough Theatre
In rep to 30 March 2002
Tues-Sat 7.30 Sat + Sun mats 3.30pm
Runs 1hr 20min No interval

TICKETS 020 7373 3842
Review Timothy Ramsden 16 March

A corner of a foreign field made rich with resonance.Chris Dunkley's accomplished play about the Serb/ Albanian conflict in Kosovo during the months leading to the American attacks of 1999 indicates he's a fine young writer. He's currently reading for a PhD in Drama at Exeter University, base for Blue Box whose professional production proves the script's strength. If Dunkley's writing is informed, but not submerged, by his reading he should produce notable work.

He draws characters whose lives, and decisions, matter within an overall political conflict. And he uses specifics to build pictures in our imaginations. Chatty 14 year old farm-girl Mirita's sudden silence when her neighbour appears catches her instinctive, justified distrust of him.

Dunkley never sentimentalises through easy resolution or easy-shock toughness. Half the characters end up dead but no death is exploited; all cement the sense of interdependent lives and the distortions of war.

There is a fine performance from Leah Fells as Mirita, friendly even with old Gregor, the lone village Serb, who is demolishing his house. Her innocence contrasts the complex violence of the topsy-turvy world around her, which is ripe for irony. Michael Bottle's ill-featured farmer uses his affluence to trap Mirita into marriage. He uses her mother as marriage-broker – an elegantly troubled Leslie O'Hara looks someone from Aga and four-wheel drive farmland rather than the clod-turning subsistence her casually handled spade tries to suggest.

Yet Besim's unseen, so important tractor is made ridiculous when his life depends on bribing Serb soldiers and a tractor's not what's needed. Besim's taken off to his farm; we don't learn if, on the brief journey, he thinks of a trick to save his life. Probably not; quick thinking's not his way. But this is a writer who understands when to leave a plot detail to audience imaginations. Mirita's eventual fate is left lingeringly undetermined, without seeming a loose end.

Dunkley skilfully treads the line dividing the rambling from the over-neat. He sets up, then undermines, the expectation the grizzled old warrior who finally arrives is Mirita's father. He's a playwright who's aware of audiences' ways of responding and that's a fine gift for a theatre career.

Mirita: Leah Fells
Gregor: Patrick Romer
Besim: Michael Bottle
Gashi: Leslie O'Hara
Gadic: Daniel Barzotti
Magovic: Stephen Harvey
Mehmeti: Pippa Sparkes
Soldier: Steve Crump

Director: Martin Harvey
Designer: Kamal Desai
Lighting: Chris Mearing
Music: John Watson

2002-03-17 13:35:39