ORPHANS To 24 October.

London.

ORPHANS
by Dennis Kelly.

Soho Theatre 21 Dean Street W1D 3NE To 24 October 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 3pm.
Audio-described 21 Oct.
BSL Signed 21 Oct.
Captioned 22 Oct 7.30pm.
Runs 1hr 50min no interval.

TICKETS: 020 7478 0100.
www.sohotheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 October.

Brilliantly contrived: urban paranoia where someone really is out to get someone.
Dean Street, the Soho Theatre’s home, runs between Shaftesbury Avenue and Oxford Street. So it’s geographically West End. Yet here’s a production with no famous star - or ‘star’ - actor, TV tie-in or big-name director (though the Lighting Designer was well-known to People Show aficionados some years ago).

Instead, Paines Plough, formed in the seventies in Lancashire, named after a pub and a brewery, and dedicated ever since to producing new scripts, with Roxana Silbert, a director blessed with the ability to make every nuance of mood, pace and flicker of expression register, and actors responsive to their character in detail, bring into the West End an object lesson in taking the pulse of the times with startling freshness.

In Dennis Kelly they have an outstanding playwright, whose spare, taut script progressively reveals the faultlines among three people trying in various ways to find the security of a family. No wonder behind the high sections of the living-room walls of Garance Marneur’s set are bars, giving a sense of barbarity and being trapped.

The characters are orphans in literal or metaphorical ways. Attempts to cling to family cohesion are undermined almost too neatly. Liam interrupts sister Helen and her partner Danny as they enjoy a hitherto unruffled meal. They sip red wine; Danny’s drenched in blood. Helen goes as far as she can for her brother in the predicament he describes. Having her own child becomes a bargaining chip. The siblings’ past is raked-up.

Liam, speaking even more than the others in short bursts, threatens Helen and Danny’s life together. His pent emotion talks fizzingly of family but his frustration mni3es frequent apologies with a moment approaching violence.

There’s certainly violence outside which these people fear but in which they easily become complicit, and it arises within a society that can itself be seen as orphaned from its previous structures. Kelly skilfully fractures existence as characters wheel around ideas, building from what they should say to what they need to get across – a fragmented tussle that’s Mamet-like in spirit but has its own style in this vividly original drama.

Liam: Joe Armstrong.
Helen: Claire-Louise Cordwell.
Danny: Jonathan McGuinness.

Director: Roxana Silbert.
Director: Garance Marneur.
Lighting: Chahine Yavroyan.
Sound: Matt McKenzie.
Assistant director: Ben Webb.

2009-10-07 11:55:27