The Play’s the Thing: On the Third Day

Published Friday 23 June 2006 at 13:40 by Mark Shenton

Now that they’re intent on solving a problem like Maria by reality TV public vote for the upcoming revival of The Sound of Music, the poacher of live theatre audiences that television represents is also turning gamekeeper to attempt to resuscitate the possibility of a previously unproduced playwright having an original straight play produced in the West End via Channel 4’s The Play’s the Thing scheme.

Staging a trial by committee and imposing a developmental process for the benefit of the TV cameras may have offered a compelling, competitive backstage glance at how plays are developed and put on but the crisis of producing new writing in the commercial theatre is accentuated, instead of solved, by this admittedly bold experimental gimmick.

Even though 51-year-old associate university lecturer Kate Betts’ winning entry, On the Third Day, is nothing if not ambitious in its bold and frequent shifts of location and time, exposing the author to this kind of spotlight and scrutiny does her no favours. In fact, the two runners-up will probably benefit more from the process in not having their plays exposed to the cruel light of day than Betts has in getting hers on.

In this densely layered and fractured play, Claire (Maxine Peake), a 30-year-old woman (prone to bouts of self-harming) and her 27-year-old brother Robbie (Tom McKay), from whom she has been estranged from for the last five years, are reunited thanks to the interventions of a man who she met in a bar and who may be the reincarnation of Jesus (Paul Hilton), as the play revisits their past in an everyday tale of parental loss and incest.

While no budding playwright could hope to be better served by a professional production and cast than the one fielded here, all brilliantly housed in Mark Thompson’s sleek, slick sets and Jon Driscoll’s atmospheric projections, the play itself overstretches itself as it attempts to flit from underground caves to the outer reaches of the solar system.