STOP THE WAR COALITION Theatre Event: Royal Court: 4 November

Royal Court
Evening of theatre in aid of the STOP THE WAR COALITION
Original Cast reading of Caryl Churchill's FAR AWAY
Reading of extracts from Kika Markham's HOMEBODY/ KABUL
Sunday 4th November 2001
Report: Vera Lustig

Inspired, timely double bill
Millinery of which, more later was a motif connecting the evening's two halves. Both pieces predate 11th September, but both are germane to the crisis. FAR AWAY is spare, unsettling, eerie, with Churchill's characteristic element of sly surprise. HOMEBODY/ KABUL, by the author of ANGELS IN AMERICA is a swooningly aromatic casserole.

The opening of FAR AWAY recalls the closing moments of Churchill's TOP GIRLS, in which a frightened girl, unable to sleep, comes downstairs to the woman she calls 'aunty'. In FAR AWAY the child, Joan, tells her aunt she has witnessed her uncle beating people in the shed. The aunt (protean Linda Bassett), caring, gently amused, contained, deflects Joan's bewildered probing.

In a Howard Barkerish sequence, the adult Joan is making extravagant hats for prisoners to wear for their execution. Finally, with all creation at war, Joan flees to her aunt's, having dutifully killed two cats and a child under five en route.

In HOMEBODY/ KABUL, the hats are more modest, but not so the scope of the monologue, given magnificent, funny, heart-rending life by Kika Markham. Homebody has come to tell us about Afghanistan. She wants to show us some Afghan hats she has bought and to read from an old guide to the glorious city Kabul one was. Shy but expansive, flustered, verbose, the kind of woman who has 'read too many books, not many, just too many' she cannot help digressing. Her stream of consciousness sweeps us past her dysfunctional marriage, on to the commodification and the erotic charge of distant, troubled cultures, the horrible fascination of bodily mutilation . . .

So, what's not to like? Just the fact that this event ever needed to be organised.

2001-11-10 16:58:00