THE ASH BOY. To 30 April.
London
THE ASH BOY
by Chris Lee
Theatre 503 The Latchmere Pub 5503 Battersea Park Road SW11 3BW To 30 April 2006
Tue-Sat 8pm Sun 5pm
Runs 1hr 55min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7978 7040
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 April
Fine playing in a gripping drama.
Lots of things in Chris Lee’s play, revived at Theatre 503 after a week’s run last month, recall other dramas. Specifically, The Caretaker as mentally impaired Jack brings back the apparently accommodating Benny to the home shared with his old mother Eve. The power play between characters can be found in other dramatists. As can the sense of characters isolated in their own world created by Alice Walkling’s blank-featured room.
But Lee has his own way in this world, in a room that’s part of a cramped, Spartan home (no-one ever seems to venture far within it). The space speaks of the past, specifically the boyhood past in which Jack will always live. His horizontally-patterned pullover suggests a boy dressed by his mother, the plastic model figures on a shelf, like the TV used only for computer games and the junk Jack imagines he can use to make sophisticated machinery, all express his childlike, volatile nature.
Combined in him is fear of life without mother (despite the anger that erupts between them) and paranoia that everyone’s spying on the pair of them. So it’s ironic he brings the cause of destruction home with him from a trip to his regular park-bench.
Though it’s Jack’s room it’s the others who occupy his bed. His mother seems to possess the room as the play opens and ends the first part on a triumphalist note, then it’s Benny who’s seated confidently when the much shorter second act begins. This act introduces a tendency towards monologue, the characters’ separateness emerging before Jack’s final, shock action.
Lee’s writing can be lyrical or sharp-edged; he uses implication skilfully. The three strong performances in Gene David Kirk’s production give the script full value (despite Celtic accents at times too emphatic to convince). Stuart Muirs’ Benny has a sinister inwardness skilfully masked by bluff cheer, Philip Brodie’s Jack finds vulnerability in all moods for this social Cinderella without a fairy godmother, while Gabrielle Hamilton’s Eve, clutching her husband’s urn, spreading his ashes in protective ritual, mixes patience, anger and the anguish of past happiness and present fears.
Eve: Gabrielle Hamilton
Jack: Philip Brodie
Benny: Stuart Muirs
Director: Gene David Kirk
Designer: Alice Walkling
Lighting: Neville Milsom
Assistant director: Jessica Beck
2006-04-28 10:08:02