Ревю London @ Live Theatre

By Nicola Owen on November 1, 2012 in Stage

Two monologues by Simon Stephens are intelligently packaged together in this production by Live Theatre, Paines Plough and Salisbury Playhouse. They come in at just over an hour of performance in total but what is short in this case is not so much sweet as sobering.

T5, is observed and heard while the actress performs what is essentially a piece of choreography. Abby Ford does an excellent, convincing job as the young, middle class mother who has been thrown into absolute chaos as a result of the brutality and cruelty she witnessed while out walking with her daughter. As the monologue unfolds it’s clear that life wasn’t exactly a bed of roses for her anyway, what with her unfaithful and disapproving husband hovering around in the background and making her feel guilty for being in the wrong place at the wrong time as well as the everyday pressures of life as a working Mum.

Ford flits around the set, the apparent safety of a bland and soulless hotel room on the fringes of Heathrow, like a trapped bird. She is a figure almost in silhouette against the opaque, curtained windows as the roar of jet engines sporadically drowns out her train of thought. In complete emotional turmoil and unable to prevent herself from spiralling into a vortex of guilt and doubt Ford illustrates how a person can be shattered when their comforting veil of normality is torn away. Her increasingly desperate outbursts of song cannot stem the tide as she is brought her knees and finally lifted above herself and us.

The set is dismantled in preparation for the next monologue and the theatre stripped back so that the bare, black brick walls can be seen. Sea Wall was originally commissioned by the Bush Theatre, London in 2008 and performed as part of the Broken Space season where the theatre opportunistically turned a lighting grid malfunction into an showcase for a series of plays which took place either in natural light or the dark. In this suddenly shadowy, stark and ordinarily secret side to Live we are presented with Alex’s story.

Cary Crankson’s Alex is full of soft reminiscences, boyish confusion and stormy flashes of anger and contempt as he tells the story of a dream holiday gone dreadfully, irreversibly wrong. Alex and Helen appear to have it all. He’s a successful photographer who married the woman of his dreams and they are now parents to six year old Lucy. Crankson engages with the audience from the second he walks out smiling nervously and maintains drive and momentum all the way through the performance. As always in Stephens’s plays some things are left unsaid but you will be in no doubt as to the impact and gravity of what has occurred and its effect on these two most normal and easy to relate to people by the end of the evening.

All in all a thought provoking, subtle and honest production evoking sympathy for both characters who have been victimised and irrevocably changed by the most tragic and random of circumstances. Also, a reminder that the fragile bubble we live our lives in can be exploded without warning.