ONE NIGHT STAND. To 2 June.
London
ONE NIGHT STAND/UNA AVENTURA
by Carol Bolt
Essential Players at the White Bear Theatre To 7 June 2002
Tue-Sat 7.30 Sun 4pm
Runs 1hr 35min One interval
Thriller-time at the White Bear, with a gripping Canadian import.This 1977 play is the late Canadian dramatist Carol Bolt's venture into psychological thrillerdom and it comes off with good effect. This is helped by the White Bear's studio-style staging and the growing intensity created by Jones and Nolan as the two sides of a one-night pick-up. All it would need are a large proscenium arch stage and a couple of tele-name actors to give it a deadening stiffness and over-importance.
For it's the youth and self-willed behaviour of Daisy and Rafe that make the play work. Yes, he's the stranger bringing danger and she's the girl imperilled in her own home (with noisy, but you feel sure, totally unhelpful, neighbours locked into their own sexual ecstasies and combat through the wall). But his self-deprecating charm is disarming. And Jones creates an uneasiness about Daisy. She's someone whose relation with her flat-sharer is tense; someone who declares she doesn't like cake, even on her birthday, yet has one stored in the fridge. And somebody who is remarkably unwilling to give details about herself even to the police. In fact, she's wary of the law all together.
Rafe has his hang-ups too. Their core is revealed in his long speech – a rare stilling of the fast psychodrama action – about his friend Andy's experience of organised gang-fights in Rio. It's Rafe - who might be willing victim, might be attacker – who speaks of needing rules; who admits to going out of control. The play's strength lies in the way the stock-in-trade of thrillers - knives, a corpse, sinister new angles on the apparently familiar – are invested with an individual significance in light of the characters' psychology.
That, and the intensity of the two performances in Siona Ankrah Cameron's highly-wrought production, which take us beyond the complacent observation of standardised characters. Nolan gives Rafe an unpredictable quality that veers between charm and menace, while Jones maintains Daisy's pleasure in his company long enough to let us see she's gaining from the encounter – and then that she's slow to realise just what she's asked back home.
Daisy: Stephanie Jones
Rafe: Paul Nolan
Director: Siona Ankrah Cameron
2002-06-02 10:55:24