Staying Alive
Kat Roberts
Tower Theatre, Stoke Newington
Star rating: 3.5
This searingly painful play about grief and loss is a brave choice and I commend director Olivia Chakraborty and her accomplished cast for running with it. It must be as emotionally draining to perform as it is to watch.
Mary (Saskia Connolly) has suffered some sort of appalling bereavement and the play, which is set around 2010, gradually reveals that her four year old son Henry has died in the sort of domestic accident which every parent dreads. But, just occasionally, these unthinkable things happen.
A professional violinist who has toured with the London Symphony Orchestra, she is a single mother supported (sort of) by her closest friends. The trouble is that they are ready to move on long before she can and they don’t know how to deal with her anyway. The play – and this cast – capture this awful awkwardness very truthfully. I remember once, in real life, walking up to a bereaved person and saying: “I have no idea what I can possibly say but I want you to know I’m here and rooting for you”. Anything rather than be one of those people who crosses the road to avoid a conversation. The trouble is that the bereaved person then ends up trying to put the sympathiser at ease and it’s that tortured issue – “the inconvenience of other people’s grief” – which Kat Roberts’s play ably confronts in most scenes. Moreover, Mary comments bitterly at one point that, whatever other people say, her grief doesn’t have a sell-by date.
There’s some fine acting in this cast of seven, especially Connolly and Jonathan Buckingham who plays her old friend, and once lover, Jack, who is now married to Jenn (Isabel Daly, good). Connolly does agony, loneliness, panic and anger very well. It’s a richly nuanced performance aided by Nick Insley’s lighting which supports Mary’s frequent “disappearance” into a twilight world of her own even when she’s in a room full of people. Buckingham’s character, is now a successful and urbane doctor but he’s very troubled by Mary’s dreadful predicament and it, too is carefully observed acting.
Less successful are the time slips and doubling which take the audience by surprise so that we’re not always sure what’s going on although I loved the scene in which Mary remembers giving Henry his first violin lesson. The scene in which Jacky Rowland, as an administrator, questions Mary when she comes to register the death is so crassly insensitive that you really couldn’t make it up and I suspect that Kat Roberts who has worked with bereavement charities, has drawn this from someone’s actual experience. There’s also a scene in which Rowland, now a social worker, comes to question Mary relentlessly about the details of the accident. She does it well enough but you have to blink and work out who she is now because she is also the date of one of Mary’s friends at a party. I’m not sure to what extent these abrupt shifts and switches stem from the structure of the play or are directorial decisions. Either way they don’t always quite work.
The sound track (Olivia Chakraborty and Samuel Jego) gives rather lovely – often poignantly atmospheric – ongoing classical music including Grieg’s Peer Gynt, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Barber’s Adagio and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons among other things. It fits Mary’s mood and her background imaginatively in this gruelling but courageous play.
