The Stage

Scorched

Published Tuesday 7 September 2010 at 10:31 by Mark Shenton

Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic has always been most comfortable at programming classic revivals with all-star casts but on considerably less sure ground when it comes to new plays, with out-and-out disasters like Cloaca and Resurrection Blues and middling failures like National Anthems and Complicit. And so it proves yet again in their new experimental space, the dank, rank Old Vic Tunnels below Waterloo station. Here, Scorched is the latest in a series of plays there with stark one word titles (it was preceded by Ditched and Aftermath) where the doleful drama only matches the bleakness of the surroundings.

Stephen Finegold and Caroline Loncq in Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad at the Old Vic Tunnels Photo: Tristram Kenton

A twin adult brother and sister embark on a journey to discover why their recently deceased mother ended her days in virtual silence. They try to pursue a mystery she leaves them in her will, to track down a brother and father they never knew. The play variously invokes pretentious metaphors from the sister’s life as a mathematician and portentous ones from the war-ravaged landscape they travel through to arrive at an explanation.

It’s almost impossible to keep a straight face when Sirine Saba’s over-earnest Janine, the daughter, asks, “Where are you taking me, mother?” and she replies, “To the heart of the polygon, Janine.” That’s the act one curtain closer, and it hardly inspires one to want to return for the second act to see where exactly that is.

Director Patricia Benecke’s production treats it all with a painfully worthy and wordy reverence, though the frequent loud rumble of trains overhead threaten to drown some of those words, especially when Jennie Stoller gives an older version of the mother a quiet dignity as she finally reveals her story.