1.17am or until the words run out
Zoe Hunter Gordon
Directed by Sarah Stacey
Finborough Theatre
Star rating:1.5
Katie (Catherine Ashdown) is in a very untidy basement bedroom strewn with clutter. Mim Houghton’s set is good. There is a party with thumping music upstairs which is, apparently where Katie should be. She appears to be trying to sort out the muddle and pack up but she is so overcome with weeping that she can’t. Clearly we’re dealing with some kind of major loss but it’s a very long tome – far too long – before the details emerge and even then it’s confusingly blurred.
When her lifelong friend Roni (Eileen Duffy) arrives Katie is passionately furious – apparently because Roni slept with the man Katie is mourning. There’s a great deal of passion and anger. So it’s about jealousy and lies with a hint of incest? Not really. But the story telling is not as clear as it should be and 75 minutes is at least a quarter of an hour too long for a piece which needs to find a chase and cut to it far sooner than it does. And although I liked, and empathised with, the stress on moving on after bereavement, the ending actually feels like an inconclusive tail-off as if the playwright has run out of ideas.
And all that is unfortunate because Ashdown and Duffy are both talented actors adept at playing off each other with a lot of attentive, reactive listening, Duffy has a wonderful way of expressing distress with a cigarette and Ashdown weeps cries with her whole body.
It’s just a pity about the play.
