SMALL MIRACLE. To 7 July.
London
SMALL MIRACLE
by Neil D’Souza
Tricycle Theatre To 7 July 2007
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 4pm & 4 July 2pm
Runs 2hr 10min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7328 1000
www.tricycle.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 22 June
Comedy disengages dramatic tension.
First seen at Colchester’s Mercury Theatre, this premiere of actor Neil D’Souza’s play brings an Asian grandmother and son, with that son’s Irish wife and their 13-year old daughter, to Knock, suitably represented as a blue-sky, fleecy-clouded picture-postcard location on Chloe Lamford’s set, the family’s caravan part three, part two-dimensional.
D'Souza explores family tensions as they come with varying degrees of expectation to Ireland’s 19th-century healing-miracle site. Ambitiously, he seeks to fit a drama of family and faith with a knockabout comedy - though nothing humorous attaches to anxious mother Bronagh, apart from her mother-in-law Meera’s repeated inability to get her name right.
Meera is little more than a comic stereotype, the grandmother who rediscovers sex. Any early suggestion this Hindu’s devotion to the Virgin Mary suggests supra-religious wisdom soon evaporates.
Souad Faress abets this, with her actorish limp and mugging facial expressions. Similarly Kulvinder Ghir is verbally over-emphatic and milks comic reactions for laughs, while Peter Dineen tactfully adopts a neutral manner ready to switch between forced humour and emotional involvement.
It’s only in the conflict between Gina Isaac’s Bronagh, torn in midlife by maternal anxiety as her over-wrought rationality tries to battle against what she sees as superstition, and her 13-year old daughter, the play strikes dramatic fire. Sadie’s guilt and teenage rebellion take her towards the mystic and conversations with a missing friend (something that gives the last word to a mobile ‘phone).
D’Souza’s attempted mix of comedy with his dramatic theme brings a lot of laughter to keep a full-length play afloat as entertainment but near sinks it as drama. A pity, for there are signs of an individual debate on faith, in an age of polarised, reductive views on a subject with ever-more complex manifestations.
Isaac, her eyes, brow and neck muscles showing Bronagh’s tension, along with her urgent moves and anguished or scornful voice, and Ella Vale as Sadie, give fine performances. Vale is clearly no 13-year old, but the impetuosity, contemptuous anger towards her mother and charge-like movements, head forward, arms hung firm and full-speed march, capture the mood of angry, determined youth.
Sadie: Ella Vale
Barry: Peter Dineen
Arjun: Kulvinder Ghir
Bronagh: Gina Isaac
Meera: Souad Faress
Director: Janice Dunn
Designer: Chloe Lamford
Lighting: Tony Simpson
Sound: Marcus Christensen
Dialect coach: Charmian Hoare
2007-06-25 08:29:21