Shrieks of Laughter

Published Monday 22 May 2006 at 09:25 by Aleks Sierz

Grief can be nightmarish - you long to be awake and discover it was all a bad dream. By the same token, a nightmare can feel so real that you wake up with a genuine sense of loss. Moses Raine’s debut plays with this feeling of being in a waking dream.

The short piece begins with Henry, a personable youngster, being hypnotised by a therapist. As he slides into sleep he finds himself in the middle of his family. His father, Raymond, is a military man who has little sympathy for weakness. His slightly eccentric mother, India, dotes on her menfolk.

Add an older brother, Thomas, and the ghastly family is complete. We see them solely through Henry’s eyes and this cleverly exaggerates Raymond’s matter-of-factness, India’s molly-coddling and Thomas’s scornful indifference.

Then the family go to sea in their motor boat. Voices drift in and out of the ship’s radio, with fragments of a disturbingly violent incident being enacted far away and then - when Henry goes to the toilet - the piece lurches into a nightmare of death and loss.

Although the play is only a fragment, it is powerfully and poetically written - 21-year-old Raine is clearly a talent to watch. But while the text seems to cry out for surrealism, Maria Aberg’s production is a bit too solidly naturalistic for its own good. Still, Tom Payne as Henry, Imogen Stubbs as India and Sam Cox as Raymond do their best to ground the dream in reality.