The Stage

Lost Monsters

Published Tuesday 2 June 2009 at 11:25 by Chris High

Occasionally a play comes along that delights at every turn and Laurence Wilson’s second full-length play, Lost Monsters is such a play.

It is a quirky story of three disparate characters breaking into a house cut off from the world by a motorway, owned by Richard (McGann), who has enough food to survive everything from a swine flu epidemic to a nuclear holocaust.

And it’s not only the outstanding acting but the set - an ordinary room on the surface that conceals a mishmash of oddities in every cupboard and drawer, all adding to the sense of the surreal that makes this play such a triumph.

The dialogue is beautifully composed and never seems strained or difficult to relate to, whereas the lighting evokes images of distant dreams that eventually intermingle with half-forgotten nightmares.

Nick Moss as the paranoid Mickey is powerful in his role, stalking the stage with great menace and intimidation. Joe McGann is his polar opposite, delivering a performance of assured calm amid a turbulent sea of uncertainty and Rebecca Ryan as Sian is a million miles away from her Shameless character, Debbie Gallagher, in her composed understatement.

Yet it is Kevin Trainor’s energy in the role of near-autistic Jonsey that drives the whole thing along, delivering his streams of facts as though reading from an encyclopaedia, while hurtling about the stage with gusto until the unexpected, underlying cause of his problem is revealed.

In short, from first to last, Lost Monsters is an intriguing, beguiling, magical delight that should be cheered and applauded to the rafters.