Skip to main content

After The End

Dundee Rep
4 stars
It's a somewhat disarming experience seeing a second home-grown
production of Dennis Kelly's brutal two-hander within weeks of
Glasgow's Citizens theatre's own. Set in a nuclear fallout shelter
where Mark and Louise might just be the last two people alive following
an apparent apocalypse, Kelly's drama sets up an increasingly ugly
power-play between Mark's geeky outsider figure and his vivacious and
popular work-mate that is at times harrowing to watch.

Director Emma Faulkner takes the audience off-site to a concrete props
store that gives the action the gritty, grimy feel required and leaves
both actors with nowhere to hide. Pulsed by the low hum of Philip
Pinsky's sound design, things start quietly enough, as Tony McGeever's
Mark attempts to explain to Helen Darbyshire's Louise exactly what
happened before and after the blast. Before long, though, hidden
agendas come to the fore as it becomes clear that the game Mark is
playing is a whole lot more serious than the Dungeons and Dragons he
starves Louise into joining in with.

For all the play's nastiness, Faulkner has extracted subtle nuances in
the text that shine through a pair of unflinching performances.
Darbyshire in particular lends complexity and maturity to an
increasingly ambiguous set-up of seismic emotional shifts. If obsession
and the manipulative abuse of power is the play's main theme, there's
something going on here too about identity and being comfortable or
otherwise in you're own skin. By the end, and despite everything Louise
has survived, a disturbing unspoken empathy between the pair remains.
They've been through hell and back, it suggests, and no-one else on
earth can say the same.

The Herald, June 21st 2011

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Art School Dance Goes On Forever – Snapshots Of Masters Of The Multiverse

Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School

1

In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.

This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.

The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.

The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
Post a Comment
Read more

Peter Brook – The Prisoner

Peter Brook is no stranger to Scotland, ever since the guru of European and world theatre first brought his nine-hour epic, The Mahabharata, to Glasgow in 1988. That was at the city’s old transport museum, which by 1990 had become Tramway, the still-functioning permanent venue that opened up Glasgow and Scotland as a major channel for international theatre in a way that had previously only been on offer at Edinburgh International Festival.
Brook and his Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord company’s relationship with Tramway saw him bring his productions of La Tragedie de Carmen, La Tempete, Pellease et Mellisande, The Man Who…, and Oh Les Beaux Jours – the French version of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days – to Glasgow.
Thirty years on from The Mahabharata, Brook comes to EIF with another piece of pan-global theatre as part of a residency by Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, which Brook has led since he decamped to Paris from London in the early 1970s. The current Edinburgh residency has alr…
Post a Comment
Read more

Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare's Globe Comes to Glasgow

Open-air Shakepeares are a summer-time perennial of the theatre calendar, attracting picnicking audiences as much as midges. More often than not, such romps through the grass are frothy, heritage industry affairs designed to be accompanied by strawberries and cream and not to be taken too seriously. Shakespeare’s Globe theatre company look set to change such perceptions when they open their outdoor tour of Romeo And Juliet in Glasgow next week as part of the West End festival.

For the two young actors taking the title roles of the doomed lovers, it will also be something of a homecoming. Richard Madden and Ellie Piercy both studied in Glasgow prior to turning professional. Indeed, Madden has yet to graduate from the acting course at RSAMD, and, as well as facing the pressures of playing such a meaty role in close proximity to the audience, will have the added anxiety of being assessed and graded by his tutors.

“This is the end of my third year,” says Madden following a Saturday mornin…
Post a Comment
Read more