Verbatim theatre is the common thread that hangs these two very different plays together, and yet one production in this double bill is far more successful in its execution than the other.
The opening play, Lines, makes a return to the Rosemary Branch and is a highly promising, original debut by writer James Fritz. It takes the contentious real-life event of the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests and imagines that a documentary play - featuring interviews with those involved on the day - was staged just months after the incident took place. An actor portraying one of the policemen interviewed by the ‘playwright’ is subsequently stabbed to death by the PC himself, outraged that he had been misrepresented and ridiculed on stage.
What follows is a cross-examination of events by those most closely connected with the play - the writer, director, parents of the dead actor and a senior police colleague of the murderer - as they attempt to either absolve themselves of responsibility or make sense of their own part in the tragedy. It’s a familiar play within a play format, but it’s a clever exploration of theatre’s potential wider impact and a look at how much care and responsibility drama should take when representing real people on stage.
Did the writer and director ultimately have a hand in their actor’s death when they agreed to give his character a stammer that the PC didn’t actually have? Ian Mairs’ assertive, righteous writer adamantly refuses to accept this, while Tom Berish’s foppish, more sensitive director proffers his own explanation: “It’s theatre - you have to break some eggs.”
All five performances contribute well (notably David Vale as the crushed father), the characters’ perspectives contrasting effectively throughout. As each contemplates their own culpability, all five confess to not really knowing where their responsibility begins or ends, as if to invite the audience to come to its own conclusions.
My Name is Rachel Corrie, originally staged by Alan Rickman at the Royal Court in 2005 to great acclaim, is less successful. There are issues with the pacing of the monologue - many of the chosen extracts are insightful and poetic, yet lines are hurried so that their metre is lost and words are stumbled over, and funny asides often fail to engage the audience.
Sophie Angelson successfully projects Rachel’s wide-eyed optimism, but is less successful at portraying her conviction and sincerity. This problem is only exacerbated when a video of the real Rachel - as a young child, giving an innocent, impassioned plea for world peace - is projected on to a wall at the very end.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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