Theatreguide.London
www.theatreguide.london
The Theatreguide.London Review
On
Blueberry Hill
Trafalgar
Studios
Spring 2020
Some clichés are valid – the
Irish really are great storytellers. Some of the finest theatre writing
from Ireland in recent decades has been as much narrative as dramatic, in
the form of single, shared or contrapuntal monologues.
Sebastian Barry's
contribution to the genre has two men take turns telling us bits of their
stories.
They do not speak to each
other or interact in any conventionally dramatic way, and it is almost
halfway through the hundred-minute play before we're sure they inhabit the
same space and time. And yet between them a story is told and brought
alive.
Their stories are in fact
related. Both, we gradually learn, are convicted (and guilty) murderers
serving life terms. One committed his crime in a moment of impulse he
still does not understand, the other did his cold-bloodedly as revenge for
the first.
Mortal enemies, they were
placed in the same cell by a sadistic gaoler to kill each other, but the
second half of Barry's play is about how something else happened between
them.
Under Jim Culleton's subtle
and sensitive direction the two actors each take the opportunity to offer
masterclasses in the creation of character and reality out of nothing but
words.
Niall Buggy makes the older
but (perhaps surprisingly) more passionate man relive all the extreme
emotions in his story as he describes them, from happiness through grief,
despair, rage and the even more difficult to portray resignation and
peace.
The younger man is both slow
of thought and less in touch with his emotions, and David Ganly achieves
the seemingly impossible in showing us things about the man he himself
doesn't have the words for.
It is quite likely that you
will come away from On Blueberry Hill with a stronger impression of the
actors than of the story they tell.
And you will also come away
filled with the effortless poetry of Sebastian Barry's language, as he
invests the characters with an irrefutably Irish instinct for evocative
imagery.
A beautiful woman 'was
walking in her own light' while another person is 'as cold as your nose in
winter' and a sociable night out is described as 'swapping jokes until
your gums bleed.'
The richness of the language, the subtlety of the performances and the warm and all-forgiving love of the play for its characters make for a life-affirming and wholly satisfying evening.
Gerald
Berkowitz
|
Receive
alerts
every time we post a new review
|