ONE DAY ALL THIS WILL COME TO NOTHING. To 9 April.

Edinburgh

ONE DAY ALL THIS WILL COME TO NOTHING
by Catherine Grosvenor

Traverse Theatre (Traverse 2) To 9 April 2005
Tue-Sat 8pm Sun 6pm
Runs 1hr 25min No interval

TICKETS: 0131 228 1404
www.traverse.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 March

Love, pain and loss in a new anomie-soaked make-over.Catherine Grosvenor's new play is a well-crafted, coherent piece of writing. It opens strikingly with a policewoman by a suicide's body. Her partner's missing, his car found at a service-area, a place that can seem buzzingly social but actually represents social fragmentation. Could he too be dead? Instead of a soliloquy, or realistic talk with another PC, Grosvenor has the corpse express Anna's anxieties, beginning an argument that rises and subsides till she's alone again with a silent body.

Personal loss and attempts to overcome it occupy both strands of Grosvenor's play. In the other Paul is trying to heal a wound (explained much later) when he stops a 16-year old boy burying himself alive, offering the lad a job in his bar. It's another place of apparent conviviality but fundamental alienation where people Drink. Smoke. Laugh. Leave. I swear to you no one will ever look at you again, he tells the youth he names Adam as he kits him out in bar-staff black.

Re-dressing for anonymity comes to Anna when an injury sustained by one of James Cunningham's anonymous, unkempt and aggressive characters leads her to remove her uniform and take to drifting herself. At home, Mark's parents retreat, father into examining the sky, mother to TV soaps.

Grosvenor earns her place in the Traverse season and benefits greatly from it. Philip Howard's punctilious direction concentrates every moment on the script, as do the fine cast. Even the least-realised characters Mark's parents have a vein of reality in these performances.

In particular, Mark Wood defines Adam's progress from surrender and tiredness with life through teenage truculence and reaction against hard work to hope when Anna comes invades the bar off-hours in her own weary search. Molly Innes is among the very finest actors of her generation; here she makes crystal clear line-by-line Anna's professional surface, personal anxiety and weary doggedness.

Next time, Grosvenor might look beyond the temptations of alienation - like violence a comparatively easy area for drama (though not so easy to do well as here). Will she see anything beyond a modern Slough of Despond?

Anna: Molly Innes
Paul: Michael Nardone
Adam: Mark Wood
Harriet: Anne Lacey
Martin: Sean Scanlan
Dead Man/Man in Street/Young Man/Man in Hostel: James Cunningham

Director: Philip Howard
Designer: Pip Keppel
Lighting: Kai Fischer

2005-03-26 19:14:14