The Stage

Last Easter

Published Wednesday 24 October 2007 at 11:50 by Pat Ashworth

You’d expect a play about a young woman dying of cancer to be all anger and railing against God.

There’s plenty of both here and it resonates with anyone who has watched someone die like this. But they’re inseparable from moments of reckless hilarity and breath-holding profundity as Lavery dares to explore the ethics of ending a life.

In the close and lively intimacy of the studio staging, the four characters easily insinuate themselves into the affections. There’s Gash (Peter Polycarpou), drag artist and promiscuous gay, and clear, shining Leah (Caroline Faber), an American Jew. Christine Kavanagh plays the loud, fierce, alcoholic Joy, and Janet Dibley the dying June. Their experience at Lourdes is both outrageously irreverent and deeply moving in its clinging hope of a miracle.

The play is full of contradictions, expressed in fragmented, tumbling language. June’s rapture at Caravaggio’s ‘The Taking of Christ’ is one intensely beautiful and powerfully lit sequence, and her remote positioning at times above the central acting area has the aura of an out of body experience.

Cameos of Christmas and Hanukkah show time slipping away. Votive candles flicker.

Such poignant episodes are in striking contrast to the side-splitting, belching drunkenness on a French patio under the stars.

This is cutting edge drama, a beautiful portrayal of love and friendship passionately realised by all four actors and most movingly by Janet Dibley. Religion gets a pasting but not an outright rejection. In pushing back the boundaries to talk about the unthinkable, it is a hugely important work.