Dundee Rep
Three stars
Three stars
Life in a hospital ward can play tricks
on you. Especially when you've had a stroke like ageing matriarch
Catherine, the tough cookie at the heart of Stuart Paterson's new
play, directed by Philip Howard in a temporary studio space that
seats the audience on the theatre's main stage either side of the
action. Used to calling the shots running her own haulage firm,
Catherine is now in a bed-ridden haze of medicated confusion, in
which a steady stream of old loves seep from her dream-state with
lifelike clarity even as she can barely recall her grandson's name.
Doctors and nurses treat her with a professional briskness as her
husband Duncan and daughter Margaret attempt to salvage a few
precious moments.
At the centre of this life in decline
is a towering performance from Ann Louise Ross, who invests Catherine
with a hard-headed steeliness that slips at crucial moments to reveal
an emotional vulnerability, before she pulls herself together to deal
with some everyday family strife. Only Catherine's commentary on
contemporary political ills feel shoe-horned in.
With the white lines of Lisa
Sangster's set suggesting a life that has roared by without pausing
to see the view, Howard's production captures a tone that is both
impressionistic and defiant in Paterson's writing. This is heightened
even more by Greg Sinclair's live cello score. This fully comes into
its own when at one point a slow and steady stream of people played
by a community cast pass by bearing gifts. This suggests a funeral
procession as much as visiting hour in an elegiac tapestry of a live
lived to the max.
The Herald, April 17th 2014
ends
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