THE WAY HOME. To 11 November.

Liverpool

THE WAY HOME
by Chloe Moss

Everyman Theatre To 11 November 2006
Mon—Sat 7.45pm
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat 1 Nov 1.30pm 11 Nov 2pm
Audio-described 9 Nov
BSL Signed 10 Nov
Runs 2hr 15min One interval

TICKETS; 0151 709 4776
www.everymanplayhouse.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 October

Laughter and sadness, in a manner that’s becoming very familiar.

Since they started regenerating the city’s 2 producing theatre, Gemma Bodinetz and Deborah Aydon have focused the Playhouse on revivals while up the hill at the down-to-earth Everyman there’s new-made Liverpool drama. Focus is on the marginal, the dysfunctional, the socially inept or abrasive. As here, with local playwright Chloe Moss finding her way home after success in London and Manchester.

Her characters’ home lives become increasingly precarious. For the O’Connors, Irish travellers on a Liverpool site, mother’s dying while fellow-traveller Margaret keeps barging in, unwanted either by Felix O’Connor or, it seems, the site managers. In bricks-and-mortar territory, tension between Ang and Paul leads to his mocking talk of the family uprooting.

Amid this the families’ teenage sons Daniel and Robert strike up a fitful friendship; there’s the start of something between Bobby and Dan’s sister Ellie too. Moss has shown herself strong with youthful friendships; she opens with a sharp exchange between the O’Connor siblings, a quarrel over a football. It’s decided by their father in a moment’s violence, expressing his inability to cope with life’s current miseries. Fathers here are bad news: when they meet it’s in a bitter argument over who’s getting jobs of work in the area.

Moss has done her research. But research too easily translates into less than fully-imagined characters and this play comes over as yet another made-to-measure example of what’s becoming the ‘Everyman play’. It’s not bad; there are plenty of laughs, the emotions are direct and the actors in Sue Dunderdale’s highly efficient production know how to do the laughter and the pity.

Bob Bailey’s set artfully combines house and mobile home (a couple of wheel-arches diagonally midway creating a focus for the latter, the set being flexibly used in the manner of early Ayckbourn). The last words, like the first, go to the young – this time Ellie and Bobby. But the ending still seems manufactured and formulaic compared with Moss’s earlier plays. The Everyman needs to venture beyond laughs and tears in emotionally-deprived margins if its new play policy isn’t to become a repository of all-too-predictable dramatic cliché.

Angela Thompson: Leanne Best
Margaret O’Driscoll: Claire Cogan
Felix O’Connor: Luke Hayden
Ellie O’Connor: Amy McAllister
Paul Thompson: Nick Moss
Daniel O’Connor: Eamonn Owens
Bobby Thompson: Joe Shipman

Director: Sue Dunderdale
Designer: Bob Bailey
Lighting: Tina MacHugh
Sound: Sean Pritchard
Dialect coach: Joe Taylor
Dramaturg: Suzanne Bell
Assistant director: Gemma Kerr

2006-10-31 17:32:17