At Dirty Protest |
| Dirty Protest- Parallel Lines , Chapter , November 21, 2013 |
The designer has put up a proscenium arch – something not often seen in Chapter, Signe Beckman has given us a clean lined, Ayckbournish box set. The stage is divided straight down the centre with the kitchens of two houses on either side. On one side the room’s décor suffers from long neglect, there’s a single, unshaded lamp bulb hanging and the battered cooker doesn’t work.The other room, with its clean lines and fitted kitchen shows signs of growing professional affluence. They are not actual neighbours but the lives of the two families become irreversibly bound together. Melissa, a former prostitute, although it seems she still occasionally might dabble, and a single mum. Jan Anderson captures the character well. She loves a life of her own and struggles to show concern and love for her daughter. Daughter, Steph seems to us at first, a typical angst ridden fifteen year old. Rachel Redford paints her character vividly and gives us some really powerful moments. She is refusing to go to school, we learn she has good reason, but at the opening of the play her mother is frustrated and is doing her best to persuade the girl to go back to school. This does cause a tension between them that falls a little short of hitting the audience right in the face. There’s no real harmony on the other side of the dividing line either. Both Simon and Julia appear to be good teachers. She prepares work for the following day and Simon is head of his department. He’s off school but has been asked to return to do two days a week. We hear so regularly of doctors sexually abusing patients, there was one in the paper last night and teachers abusing children that it has almost become commonplace. Simon has recently been cleared of such a case but he has become deeply disturbed by the aftermath. Both Lisa Diveney as Julia and Gareth Price give us excellent and believable performances. Nevertheless we are not being drawn into their lives with much of a degree of concern. It’s almost as if we are peering at them all, helplessly through a window. Which, I guess is what much of the world does in these difficult situations. The actual perpetrator of the crime was not Simon but one of his colleagues to whom no accusation was made, but Simon was there whilst it was all happening and failed to take any action. It is this inaction that has traumatised Steph more that the actual physical abuse itself. She breaks into Simon’s house, steals some of Julia’s things, The back wall of the kitchen becomes transparent and we see Steph using Julia’s dressing table and later there she cuts her shoulder length hair into a very short bob. An action that worries her mother who never gets the full facts until very near the end of the play. Everyone becomes deeply traumatised by the sickening event, except the actual perpetrator. We end with Steph and Simon side by side in the centre of the stage still in each other rooms, they give us some angst driven philosophy with Steph telling us it is still Simon’s inactivity that is the greater sin and we leave her and the lives of all of them still wrestling with a problem that is never likely to leave them. Although director Catherine Paskell moves events along at a good pace and smoothly takes us from one location to the other and writer Katherine Chandler tells her story with great clarity, I desperately wanted to be more drawn into the action and to emphasise more strongly with the characters. |
Reviewed by: Michael Kelligan |
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