4 STARS, July 13-21. Richard Davies is impressed by the rising talent on show at this year’s Orange Tree Theatre Directors’ Festival
Robert Day
In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises) by Nina Segal is one of three plays staged at the Orange Tree Theatre for its Directors’ Festival, run in partnership with the St Mary’s University MA Theatre Director course.
Beginning with the sound of a baby crying inconsolably, we meet the two characters, named simply Man and Woman, played by Ziggy Heath and Anna Leon Brophy. Although in love with each other and their newborn baby, they are also demented with sleep deprivation, emotionally frazzled and never far from hysteria. Using only indirect speech, they weave stories about their lives, hopes and fears. Both are weighed down by the awesome responsibility of bringing a new life into the world and the knowledge that they cannot protect their daughter from all the bad stuff out there.
For some parents, this play will transport you back to that “oh shit” moment when you first bring your child home from the maternity ward and realise that life will never be the same again. Or when you start to suspect that parenthood is a trick that each generation plays on the next in order to preserve the species; no one really tells you what it's truly like, and even if they did, you wouldn't believe them.
Robert Day
Director Evangeline Cullingworth has injected great energy, pace and passion into this challenging and poetic two hander. In the Orange Tree's very intimate space, the two actors constantly create unexpected vectors of movement, at times breaking out of it altogether. By looking directly at the audience, they draw you into their squabbles until you feel like jury members in some domestic courtroom.
Heath and Brophy both impressed with their performances, demonstrating powerful emotional range and strong personal chemistry, even if I wasn’t entirely convinced that either had ever spent a long night trying to soothe a colicky baby.
My only criticism is that as a one act play roughly fifty minutes long, it felt a bit like leaving a restaurant after the starter course. However that was my misfortune to visit on the festival preview night: most nights the theatre puts on two plays with an interval, which would make a more satisfying night out.
Tickets: orangetreetheatre.co.uk
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