PALACE OF THE END. To 21 February.
Manchester.
PALACE OF THE END
by Judith Thompson.
Royal Exchange Studio To 21 February 2009.
Mon-Fri 7.30pm Sat 8pm Mat Wed 2.30pm Sat 4pm.
Post-show Discussion 12, 19 Feb.
Runs 1hr 40min No interval.
TICKETS: 0161 833 9833.
www.royalexchange.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 February.
Elements of a conflict from around the world gather into a finely-drawn picture.
Theatre’s become used to plays built out of monologues, so the stakes are high: how to maximise the form without giving the sense of missing out on dramatic debate. Canadian Judith Thompson’s outstanding play justifies itself first because there is no way the characters, wuth their perspectives on the Iraq invasion, could have met.
It also carries a dramatic structure, interwoven with repeated images, like that of flight. Lynndie, sat at her army-office desk, practising rudimentary French, is leaving the USA for Canada. David, speaking as he dies in early morning rural peace, says his spirit will be watching. Both these Westerners see their post-Iraq lives as a looking-glass world.
In the final voice, from Iraq, the dominant image is Saddam Hussein’s torture establishment, the ironically-named eponymous palace. Lynndie flees to Canada, David to another world; Nehrjas speaks from death’s dream kingdom. Human affection contrasts the torture that manipulates love, as well as create physical pain. The cruelties described could easily become excessive, were it not for the speaker’s evident humanity.
Thompson broadens her characters’ sense of awareness, from Lynndie’s facile chatter, through David’s reflective shock to Nehrjas’s hard-learned understanding of human values, bred through long suffering under well-orchestrated state terror.
Greg Hersov’s British premiere catches the play’s tonal range and widening consciousness with three perfectly-cast performances. Kellie Bright’s Lynndie, face set in almost-smile default mode, embodies the simple mind caught up in a situation – the US military’s degradation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib – way beyond her pay-grade.
Robert Demeger’s David Kelly is finely-wrought; the studied academic whose conscience has been exposed to matters outside his academic world; Demeger provides the character a calmness shot-through with moments of physical pain as he dies, mineral-water bottle at his side.
And Eve Polycarpou brings a tea-table serenity to her description of the unimaginable made concrete, the moments of agony arising within her deep-veined humanity. All three, finally seen together, yet silent and spread apart across the Exchange Studio, are beautifully balanced by Hersov in a play that uses its form and contrasting registers to give classical dignity to a dark modern instance.
My Pyramids:
Lynndie: Kellie Bright.
Harrowdown Hill
David: Robert Demeger.
Instruments of Yearning:
Nehrjas: Eve Polycarpou.
Director: Greg Hersov.
Designer: Miriam Nabarro.
Lighting: Richard Owen.
Sound: Claire Windsor.
2009-02-09 11:55:20