THE LAST OBIT. To 2 June.
London
THE LAST OBIT
by Peter Tinniswood
New End Theatre To 2 June 2002
Tue-Sat 7.30 Mat Sat & Sun 3.30pm
Runs 1hr 15min No interval
TICKETS 020 7794 0022
Review Timothy Ramsden 12 May 2002
Elegiac yet intriguing, Tinniswood's haunted solo is hauntingly produced and performed. What's life like when you spend it writing about the dead? Millicent Clayton has done that, in an old-fashioned journalistic world, for most of her life. She followed H.K. Jefferson – great obituarist, shame about the personality. And, seeing him with a prostitute in the street, she started following him literally, leading to a habit of trailing strangers. It's been a life in the shadows of others.
Yet there's a rich sensualism to Millicent's work. The typewriter, let alone the computer, was too impersonal for her. A firm fountain-pen thoughtfully trawling lined paper was her tribute to the significant departed others.
Outside her office, the century's calamities have touched her. Dad died in World War I. Stepfather touched the girl too literally, behind his new wife's back. Millicent's lover died at sea in World War II.
Tinniswood's beautifully-controlled, poetic text, lyrical without being portentous, contains flashes of touching humour, such as the image of W.H. Auden dropping a greengage. It receives a moving performance from Eve Pearce, that, thanks also to Joe Harmston's precise direction, never slips into the generalised.
Once again, a New End production is greatly enhanced by a design from Nicolae Hart Hansen. His old-style office, neutrally coloured, with fireplace and other fittings evident as blanked out patches, is dominated by the solidity of Millicent's desk. One wall's stacked high with filing cabinets, reinforcing the play's increasingly strange world.
Throughout, her final subject's biography slips and veers, always coming closer to the obituarist's own. Doors will not open, the high window is impossibly high; Millicent's clothing is redolent of a 1950s party-girl, apart from the scruffy '90s trainers – the main purpose for which seems to be as a cuddly bedtime comfort toy.
Pearce induces a sense of a life worth living, despite being built around loss and being always the watcher, the commentator, never the subject. It's only when tensions are resolved – in the finest part of the script, a serenely performed happy dream of a life-cycle struggling yet, despite all the slaughter, overall triumphant – that light floods in and locks spring open. It's a joyous, well-achieved climax.
Millicent: Eve Pearce
Director: Joe Harmston
Designer: Nicolai Hart Hansen
Lighting: Robert Bryan
2002-05-15 00:13:19