ON THE BEACH (The Contingency Plan) To 6 June.
London.
ON THE BEACH
(The Contingency Plan) by Steve Waters.
Bush Theatre In rep to 6 June 2009.
11-12, 18-20, 25-26 May, 1-3 June 7.30 Mat Sat 2.30pm.
Audio-described 16 May.
Captioned 23 May.
Runs 2hr One interval.
TICKETS: 0208743 5050.
On-line: www.bushtheatre.co.uk
Review: Carole Woddis 7 May.
Abandoning temperate zones.
Steve Waters has been brewing-up for something special for a while now. And with these two new plays, collectively called The Contingency Plan, he’s hit the spot. Each can be seen separately but seeing both adds immeasurably to their potency.
It can’t be too long before On the Beach and Resilience transfer from the tiny Bush Theatre to a larger stage or stages. For not only is their subject – climate change and the melting ice caps – controversially pressing. The form in which Waters has chosen to write the two plays, linking scientific knowledge and government, make them nothing less than a veritable `state of the Nation’ statement.
On the Beach sets the scene. Will, a young glaciologist, returns home from Antarctica to his parents with Sarika, a senior civil servant who is his newly-acquired girl-friend. In his time, Robin, his father, was on the point of becoming the foremost climate expert in his field. But something `happened’. He had a breakdown and retreated to the Norfolk coast where his wife, Jenny, has lovingly stood by him whilst he has continued to monitor his habitat in forensic detail.
To warn or not to warn is the question that becomes clearer in the second play.
In On the Beach, Waters (good name in the circumstances) concentrates on the family. Robin’s long held predictions of rising sea levels and coastal flooding, and the tensions arising from a son rebelling against his father’s legacy, get fused into molten fury.
A doomsday scenario, On the Beach, however, is no `disaster’ movie writ small. It’s much cleverer than that and what makes it special is the quality of Waters’ writing: spry, sharp, meticulously researched and suffused with an intense sense of locality. Crucially, Waters never loses sight of the personal battling against the inner as well as outer rising temperature levels.
Director Michael Longhurst directs with scrupulous clarity. And the acting is simply incomparable, with Robin Soans producing in Robin, a character every bit as elemental as the conditions he has been scrutinising for so long. Nerve-tingling in every sense.
Will: Geoffrey Streatfield.
Sarika: Stephanie Street.
Robin: Robin Soans.
Jenny: Susan Brown.
Director: Michael Longhurst.
Designer: Tom Scutt.
Lighting: Oliver Fenwick.
Sound: Emma Laxton.
Associate director: Hannah Ashwell-Dickinson.
Assistant director: Francesca Seeley.
Assistant designer: Verity Sadler.
2009-05-11 03:41:30