SOMEONE WHO'LL WATCH OVER ME. To 18 June.

London

SOMEONE WHO'LL WATCH OVER ME
by Frank McGuinness

New Ambassadors Theatre To 18 June 2005
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu (except 21 April, 19 May, 9 June) & Sat 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 20min One interval

TICKETS: 0870 060 6627
Review: Timothy Ramsden 20 April

Time has overtaken a play where the contrivances soon become apparent.The West End's about star (or famous) actors; so no worries here. Three strong performers give powerful performances. Though Frank McGuinness's play is set in a bare room where 3 hostages are being held, this trio bring out more humour than you'd think possible.

But I've never belonged to Someone's extensive critical fan-club. Scratch away the no longer quite contemporary political surface (this was when hostages often came home rather than being displayed on videos and executed) and there's the old popular middle-brow drama manipulating us between the relief of laughter and serious concern.

Not, I'm sure, how Frank McGuinness set out, but a claustrophobic situation with political overtones (There was an Irishman, an American and an Englishman ') means a lot of ideas thrown into a dramatic structure with room for manoeuvre as limited as the shackled hostages. Developing their three nations' colonial, or colonising, pasts and present characteristics, no wonder prison walls soon close around the action. It's a sustained situation that needs more internal exploration than McGuiness's representative types have to offer.

In a way, high-profile casting works against the piece. These egos, you feel, would be red and raw long before they'd pursued any of the play's carefully patterned pathways. Most successful is Aiden Gillen's Irishman, whose already developed relationship with American Adam has got to the prisoner's equivalent of businessmen playing squash together - Dominic Dromgoole's production starts pacily as it means to continue, the curtain rising on the pair mid keep-fit press-ups.

Adam does little beyond being a freedom-loving American unable to cope with being cooped-up. The production's prominence given to his religious reading might suggest a Dubya-age fundamentalism the play doesn't bear out generally, post-Gulf War anti-Americanism needs to be edited out of responses to the action.

David Threlfall's backwoods English academic is a brilliant performance and ultimately, when the man whose capture disturbed the original dynamic is left solo, quoting medieval verse, a touching one. But it isn't very convincing. The slightly veiled voice, the memory-burdened mind, are demonstrated rather than created. Manufactured, as the play, for all its momentary qualities, itself remains.

Adam: Jonny Lee Miller
Edward: Aidan Gillen
Michael: David Threlfall

Director: Dominic Dromgoole
Designer: Anthony Lamble
Lighting: Paul Anderson
Sound: Fergus O' Hare
Assistant director: Carrie Cracknell

2005-04-25 12:08:15