Double Portrait

Published Tuesday 11 March 2008 at 10:05 by Jason Best

Tom Shkolnik’s intense two-hander appears on first view to be a study in opposites.

An expressive diptych, it portrays two sisters who apparently could not be more different - they occupy the stage together but inhabit different worlds. Academic Nicole (Nicole Scott) is evidently on top of her life, briskly delivering a polished seminar in London to a class of invisible students, while her anguished sibling Jodie (Jodie McNee) is mired in suicidal despair in Liverpool.

As Shkolnik’s drama unfolds, however, we realise that Nicole and Jodie have more in common than it seems - grappling in their own ways with the fallout from a hopelessly dysfunctional upbringing - one by running away, the other by shrinking deeper into passive despair. They truly are sisters under the skin.

Yet vivid though Shkolnik’s Double Portrait undoubtedly is, as a drama it remains an unfinished sketch, a preliminary outline for something more substantial. The sisters’ parallel monologues are striking without going particularly deep. As it is, the ironic juxtapositions Shkolnik creates are sometimes a touch glib, as when Nicole elucidates Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to her class, while her sister simultaneously attempts to slit her wrists. But the acting can’t be faulted, and McNee’s all-consuming performance is brave and compelling in its emotional nakedness.