Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars Watching Samuel Beckett is a bit like listening to Country and Western music. The older you get, it seems, the more you understand where they're coming from. This is likely to have been the case for many who saw all five productions of the Edinburgh International Festival's season of Beckett's non-stage works. This final piece, produced by Dublin's Gate Theatre, finds actor Peter Egan transforming Beckett's brief and at times brutal novella into an extended solo routine to die for. It begins beside a grave and ends with a baby's cry, as Egan's lone figure regales the audience with a life and death yarn that begins with him telling how he associates his brief 'marriage' to a woman he meets on a bench with his father's death. Used to keeping both himself and others at an emotional distance, the affection he feels for the woman he first calls Lulu and later Anna catches him by surprise. Even as he moves into the room next to hers, however, he can feel the love he has let into his life dissipating after just one night of passion, and once a child is born, he can stand it no longer, and flees. Egan relates all this in Toby Frow's production with a gloriously unsentimental gallows humour which, as he relives every moment of his and Lulu/Anna's liaison, turns out to be a form of self-protection. As assorted doors and windows are discreetly projected behind him, he remembers the song she sang, but not the words, however much it haunts him still in a life spent trying to purge something that will never go away in this bitter-sweet hymn of regret. The Herald August 29th 2013 ends
Adam Smith Theatre,
Kirkcaldy Four Stars
It’s a case of whoops, there goes the neighbourhood twice over in Rapture Theatre’s revival of Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which opens in 1959 in the same Chicago suburb where Lorraine Hansberry’s drama, A Raisin in the Sun, which appeared that year, is set. Here, Robin Kingsland’s Russ and his wife Bev, played by Jackie Morrison, are preparing to move out of their now almost empty des-res following a family tragedy.
Unknown to them, the bargain basement price tag has enabled a black family to move in, with Jack Lord’s uptight Karl a self-appointed spokesperson for the entire ‘hood. Russ and Bev’s black maid Francine (Adelaide Obeng) and her husband Albert (Vinta Morgan), meanwhile, bear witness to a barrage of everyday racism. Fast forward half a century, and a white family are trying to buy the same house, albeit with a heap of proposed changes which the black couple representing the block’s now much more diverse community aren’t…
It’s a case of whoops, there goes the neighbourhood twice over in Rapture Theatre’s revival of Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which opens in 1959 in the same Chicago suburb where Lorraine Hansberry’s drama, A Raisin in the Sun, which appeared that year, is set. Here, Robin Kingsland’s Russ and his wife Bev, played by Jackie Morrison, are preparing to move out of their now almost empty des-res following a family tragedy.
Unknown to them, the bargain basement price tag has enabled a black family to move in, with Jack Lord’s uptight Karl a self-appointed spokesperson for the entire ‘hood. Russ and Bev’s black maid Francine (Adelaide Obeng) and her husband Albert (Vinta Morgan), meanwhile, bear witness to a barrage of everyday racism. Fast forward half a century, and a white family are trying to buy the same house, albeit with a heap of proposed changes which the black couple representing the block’s now much more diverse community aren’t…
Comments