MURDER OF REALITY. White Bear to 10 March.
London
MURDER OF REALITY
by Deborah Lavin
Singular Theatre Company at the White Bear Theatre To 10 March 2002
Tuesday-Sunday 8pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval
TICKETS 020 7793 9193
Review Timothy Ramsden 24 February
Human passions break out during a liberal-cool gallery opening in Lavin's intriguing morality play.Whether the Workhouse Gallery was adapted from a former Workhouse, or was just baptised with a prole-chic name, its image of cool is blasted by a furnace of emotions. Joint owners Suzie and Nigel are splitting up so he can marry the Latino chick he's impregnated. Love might follow, but not with the speed of Suzie's jealous fury.
Centrepiece of their gallery's new exhibition of celeb. war photographer Charlie Novak's African pictures is one showing a pregnant woman moments before death, her innards ripped open by soldiers. She died; the baby survived, if we believe Ben Akelele's claim to be that child, come to reclaim his mother's image. Wafting through the relationship dilemmas is career-bitch journalist Lizzie Alderton, lovelessly married to her paper's billionaire owner.
It's a rich mix, only occasionally going stodgy. Anger brings out Suzie's Oldham origins in the opening moments, reducing the impact at a later crisis. And the First World/Third world arguments are over-prolonged in act two. Characters go on hold while Issues take centre stage. Important ones, yes, but in this detail they're another play.
Yet Lavin shows a sense of belonging is important in a world of shifting values, which undermine relationships as well as forming them. Suzie's southern veneer is a mild dislocation beside Ben's maturing to ethical agronomist. You might say Lizzie sounds Irish, but she'll snap back she's British.
Delectable young Luisa's Colombian family wouldn't accept her as an unmarried mother so Nigel has to split from Suzie. Even Eileen, the resilient gallery gofer and lifelong local council-house tenant, has suffered on the global carousel. Her Greek husband died in a fight with a neighbour who'd called him Turkish.
Lavin finds her moral centre, just about credibly, in the chrysalis of concern between Suzie and Novak. Their prospective final fade-out idyll seems shaky but anything's better than Lizzie's cynical careerism or Nigel's moral equivocation. Julek Neumann's well-paced, tonally varied production has good performances, especially from Sioned Jones' Suzie. She starts both acts scrunched in anxiety, so if the end's a bit soft-centred, well she deserves the break.
Suzie Brandon: Sioned Jones
Eileen Alexopoulus: Lesley Rowan
Charlie Novak: Ken Samuels
Nigel Gainsford: Richard Earthy
Lizzie Alderton: Emma Flett
Ben Akelele: Vernon Douglas
Luisa: Roberta Arantes
Director: Julek Neumann
Designer: Janet Bird
Lighting: Emma Chapman
Costume: Heather MacVean
2002-02-25 10:54:18