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The TheatreguideLondon Review
World
Enough
And Time
Park
Theatre Spring 2014
Sarah Sigal's new play for Fluff Productions interweaves three separate stories in alternating scenes.
In the Seventeenth Century the women of a royalist village, their men all gone to war, nervously await the arrival of Cromwell's troops. In 1936 a shallow fashion writer finds herself caught up in a girl's-own adventure involving Nazis, Wallace Simpson and the British secret service. And in the present day a high-flying businesswoman watches her perfect life begin to crumble.
The first and third are multiple-character plays, the middle one a monologue.
The strength of the play lies in Sigal's success in creating the three worlds and stories in what amounts to about thirty minutes of disconnected short scenes each. The weakness lies in the fact that they never really connect or resonate with each other, leaving one with the suspicion that the playwright had drafts of three separate plays on hand and, rather than developing any of them more fully, just cut and pasted them together.
Of the three, the modern story is, at least in its present form, too familiar and unoriginal. The Civil War story has more potential, though the sketch gives too little hint of where it might go if extended.
Only the 1936 monologue seems complete as it stands, and stripped apart from the others (and perhaps punched up with a few more jokes) would make a very satisfying comic piece.
Justin Audibert's production brings out all the strengths in the script and provides an impressive showcase for the all-female cast, with Rebecca Dunn capturing both the initial silliness and the growing self-discovery of the 1936 woman, while Jess Murphy, Katie Bonna, Yvonne Riley and Sarah Kameela Impey successfully move back and forth between very different roles in the Seventeenth and Twenty-first Century stories.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review - World Enough And Time - Park Theatre 2014