Latest trip to the Almeida clever, clever play beautifully acted. Michel Billington puts it much more eloquently below.
It is good to be reminded that there is more to Australian theatre than Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. This superb play by Andrew Bovell has the same fiendishly ingenious cats cradle structure as his Speaking in Tongues, which was filmed as Lantana. And it tackles even richer themes: father-son relationships, the past's ability to devour the future, the cataclysmic nature of the environment.
The action switches geographically between London and Australia and, temporally, between 1959 and 2039; and the connections it weaves are so subtle as to make the story murder to describe.
The pivotal scenes take place in London in 1988, where the 28-year-old Gabriel Law confronts his reticent, alcoholic mother. We learn that Gabriel's father mysteriously decamped to Australia when the boy was seven, sent his son seven cryptic postcards from the outback and disappeared on Ayers Rock. Going back in time, we discover the reasons for the father's exile; and, as Gabriel heads down under to retrace his father's footsteps, we move forwards to see how the past shapes the future.
Henry James talked of discovering "the figure in the carpet", and the crucial figure here is the deterministic nature of time.
Across four generations of a family, people constantly console themselves about the weather by saying "still, there are people drowning in Bangladesh". Saturn is repeatedly invoked in the form of both the planet and the Roman god who consumed his own son. But, for all the play's intellectual ingenuity, what emerges is a pervasive sense of loss and loneliness as fathers disappear and mothers retreat into their own world.
The one false note comes when a character offers an erudite summary of Diderot's Enlightenment philosophy, but even this bears fruit in that Diderot's observation about man's urge to consume more than he needs relates to Bovell's vision.
This is a play for those who enjoy tightly wrought drama. Michael Attenborough's production is also the finest he has done in his Almeida tenure: the combination of Miriam Buether's design and Stephen Warbeck's elliptical piano music perfectly expresses the play's mood. There are glowing performances from Tom Mison as Gabriel, Phoebe Nicholls and Lisa Dillon as his mother's older and younger selves and Jonathan Cullen as the disappearing father.
But all nine actors are equally good and the image of them seated around a table carries an almost Biblical weight. In fact, one of the strangest features of this utterly compelling play is that, for all its rationalist instincts, it suggests that the sins of the father are always visited upon the children.
The action switches geographically between London and Australia and, temporally, between 1959 and 2039; and the connections it weaves are so subtle as to make the story murder to describe.
The pivotal scenes take place in London in 1988, where the 28-year-old Gabriel Law confronts his reticent, alcoholic mother. We learn that Gabriel's father mysteriously decamped to Australia when the boy was seven, sent his son seven cryptic postcards from the outback and disappeared on Ayers Rock. Going back in time, we discover the reasons for the father's exile; and, as Gabriel heads down under to retrace his father's footsteps, we move forwards to see how the past shapes the future.
Henry James talked of discovering "the figure in the carpet", and the crucial figure here is the deterministic nature of time.
Across four generations of a family, people constantly console themselves about the weather by saying "still, there are people drowning in Bangladesh". Saturn is repeatedly invoked in the form of both the planet and the Roman god who consumed his own son. But, for all the play's intellectual ingenuity, what emerges is a pervasive sense of loss and loneliness as fathers disappear and mothers retreat into their own world.
The one false note comes when a character offers an erudite summary of Diderot's Enlightenment philosophy, but even this bears fruit in that Diderot's observation about man's urge to consume more than he needs relates to Bovell's vision.
This is a play for those who enjoy tightly wrought drama. Michael Attenborough's production is also the finest he has done in his Almeida tenure: the combination of Miriam Buether's design and Stephen Warbeck's elliptical piano music perfectly expresses the play's mood. There are glowing performances from Tom Mison as Gabriel, Phoebe Nicholls and Lisa Dillon as his mother's older and younger selves and Jonathan Cullen as the disappearing father.
But all nine actors are equally good and the image of them seated around a table carries an almost Biblical weight. In fact, one of the strangest features of this utterly compelling play is that, for all its rationalist instincts, it suggests that the sins of the father are always visited upon the children.
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