SOMEONE WHO'LL WATCH OVER ME. To 16 June.
Manchester
SOMEONE WHO’LL WATCH OVER ME
by Frank McGuinness
Library Theatre To 16 June 2007
Mon-Thu 7.30pm Fri-Sat 8pm Mat 7, 9, 14, 16 June 3pm
Audio-described 7 June 7.30pm 9 June 3pm
BSL Signed 6 June
Captioned 12 June
Pre-show Talk 14 June 7.30pm 16 June 3pm
Runs 2hr 35min One interval
TICKETS: 0161 236 7110
www.librarytheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 May
Exemplary production of doubtful prison drama.
In 15 years Frank McGuinness’s Lebanon hostage drama has seen many productions, including a 2005 West End revival. It’s not only the 2001 attacks on New York that have given it currency (they actually make it seem comparatively cosy. Targeted hostage-taking of individuals in Lebanon, with a chance of survival, is nothing by the side of present mass-death threats and warfare).
A cast of three on one shabby set makes this one about the Irishman, the American and the Englishman in a cell together, comparatively economic to produce. But even more, there’s the scent of a significant theme, though McGuinness’s drama turns out sugar-coating through-and-through.
Audience emotions are manipulated as in any traditional boulevard drama; that West End revival wasn’t altogether surprising. Separate scenes move between comedy and personality clashes as much as anything in Driving Miss Daisy or its ilk. Any of the survival tactics might occur – imagining a drink in a bar, creating film scenarios or even recreating a Wimbledon Ladies’ Final – but there’s no sense of the gruelling confinement, tedium and fear behind it all. It’s stated; but not shown. This is speeded-up hostage drama, skimmed with surface psychology, laundered for entertainment.
The best staging I recall was at Salisbury’s Salberg Studio, where the audience was led through corridors into an enclosed environment. The Library can’t match that, though Judith Croft’s segment of a bombed building, wires loose in the floor above the cell, gives a strong sense of the wider conflict in which the characters are caught and in which their unseen, undefined captors live.
Drector Chris Honer has marshalled an impeccable trio of performances in a scrupulous production that gives the play as much consistency as possible. Alun Raglan defines they-can’t-do-this-to-me Americanism without seeming effortful or unintelligent, while Damian Kearney’s Irish journalist moves convincingly between fury, song and humour. It’s a mix calculated to puzzle Michael Mears’ English lecturer, shoved to Lebanon when Early English studies dwindle at British universities. Mears is magnificent, dredging boyish humour out from under academic abstraction and disbelief. If you want to catch McGuinness’s play, there’s no better production likely.
Adam: Alun Raglan
Edward: Damian Kearney
Michael: Michael Mears
Director: Chris Honer
Designer: Judith Croft
Lighting: Nick Richings
Sound: Paul Gregory
2007-05-29 00:39:18