Brenda Blethyn returns to the Exchange for the world premiere of a new play by popular Irish novelist Edna O’Brien.
According to director Braham Murray, O’Brien approached Blethyn who, in turn, proposed the play to him. The result is a love triangle with terrific roles for all three actors.
In the London suburbs, Mr and Mrs Berry, superbly played by Niall Buggy and Brenda Blethyn, appear to be in an episode of Keeping Up Appearances. She’s the bossy, working wife with a head scarf harnessing a bouffant hair-do, while he is the befuddled house-husband, locked in a sterile marriage, but indulging in his fantasies.
Blethyn excels in playing housewives under stress and the dramatic climax of this work arises when Mrs Berry realises her husband has an unconsummated passion for Hazel, a fragile young woman sensitively played by Beth Cooke. The anti-climax comes when their fractured lives begin to crack.
Strong echoes of several stage, television and film dramas appear in this work, with the death of a real or imagined child reminiscent of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf combined with the flowering verbal and visual rose imagery of American Beauty.
Laced with a surfeit of literary allusions and poetic quotations, it allows those of us who recognise them to preen with self-gratification, but eventually irritates when all three talk constantly in quotes.
Murray rises to the challenge of keeping things moving at pace in a work which brought some laughter but little compassion.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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