| Sharp and powerful performances |
At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Past Away , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , October 3, 2002 |
| Kudos to Sgript Cymru for daring to produce the writing of an unknown 22-year-old playwright, Tracy Harris. There are a lot of theatre companies out there that probably would not take this chance. As for Simon Harris’ staging of Past Away, at some moments Sgript Cymru’s risk-taking certainly paid off. At others, Harris’ writing frustratingly moves in well-traced, sometimes predictable, and not always engaging directions. If, a few months or years from now, you want to see what Harris wrote before the more striking work she seems capable of writing next, see Past Away as it continues its tour. Actors Shane Attwool and Chris Lennard skilfully draw out the script’s strengths. Their performances are sharp and powerful while still nuanced and natural, particularly in the case Lennard’s more complex character. In Past Away, Brian (Attwool) and Joe (Lennard) are cooped up in their recently deceased father’s house, following his death and Brian’s homecoming from years of vagabondage. Upon his unexpected return, Brian has brought his wife, Susan (Nia Roberts) and found himself exiled to Dad’d deathbed room because his own room is now occupied by Eddie (Oliver Ryan), a lodger whose ties with the family might not be limited to a financial transaction. While everyone wants to move beyond the past, they can’t, because it keeps coming back to find them, sometimes literally in the person of Dave, a sinister banker who at Susan and Brian’s wedding gave new and truer meaning to the term “Best Man.” They also want to move beyond the present—away from themselves and from the desires, habits, and liabilities they still experience. Their hopeless struggle to do this—while they blindly blame everything on Dad, Dave, death, and the vagarities of fate—is interesting and Harris deeply mines it. The character of Joe is sympathetic and most intriguing. Constantly and patronisingly nagged to take his antipsychotic medicine and to drink his beer, he is the only sane and sober person in the house, the only one whose feelings are not deadened and who is capable of love that gives rather than just exploiting. Watching this, I eagerly hoped for him to break free. The themes of burial (of the dead and the living) are emphasised in the design of Max Jones’ white-and-dirt coloured set, with its tombstone slabs of broken walls, and barely-lit sunken living room resembling an open grave. The other characters are more predictable, and Harris sometimes seems to mimic some of Osborne, Orton, and Pinter’s characterisations without building on or transforming them, and this made some scenes rather slow. Susan is very one-dimensional, especially when viewed against Joe’s complexity, and seems to have no distinguishing character traits outside of her sexual roles. The very short scenes isolated in different rooms of the house with abrupt transitions often seem better suited to film or T.V. than the stage. That said, I saw this play in the large main theatre of Aberystwyth Arts Centre, and I kept trying to imagine it in the studio theatre at Chapter Arts Centre, where the compactness of the space is more conducive to Harris’ close-up portrait of her characters and their sepulchral home. (The recent production of Pinter’s THE CARETAKER in the Arts Centre’s main theatre suffered from the same problem.) I really look forward to seeing what Harris writes next, to seeing more characters as fully developed and interesting as Joe, and hopefully to seeing it in an intimate theatre that can do justice to microscope-examination of human relationships, if that is what she chooses to tackle again. |
Reviewed by: Rebecca Nesvet |
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