Review: Every One Royal Lyceum

Published on Monday 22 March 2010 09:18

Every One **** Royal Lyceum

TOUGH and emotional, Jo Clifford's new play for the Royal Lyceum takes an unblinking look into the tragedy of a death in the family, in a production which breaks theatrical conventions and crosses social boundaries.

This is genuinely exciting stuff, which is a touch surprising for a subject so morbid and a staging that, at the outset, is so static.

But it is that staging which allows director Mark Thomson to do Clifford's words such justice.

There is no real break between the audience's arrival and the start of the show. The house lights don't dim and the only hint that a performance has actually started is when the ushers close the doors and take their places.

The scenery, such as it is, creates a room at the front of the stage, a box that is barely deep enough to accommodate the five performers who will, after a while, appear. It is walled with dirty, concave mirrored tiles.

Into this box which reflects, after a fashion, both them and the audience, walk the five family members to whom the tragedy will occur. They, in a series of dry, sometimes faltering, always completely natural monologues, reveal who they are and how they came upon the fateful day when one of them suffers a stroke.

So far, so much great radio. But it is in the off-the-monologue performances that the real details lie. The often subtle reactions create a family who are somehow universal. The fine details of their lives are unique, obviously, but their relationships and personalities are created in such a way that they could be, as the play's title suggests, any one.

This is, in the first half at least, a quintet of near-impeccable performances. There's Kyle McPhail as the son, Kev, who lives in a cyber world of computer games. Jonathan Hackett as the father, Joe, a teacher who Latin verbs help find another way of defining a world to escape into.

Kathryn Howden is particularly brilliant as Mary, the mother whose world is created through the lives of her family and who, by describing it, recreates that world for the audience. Jenny Hulse plays Mazz, the daughter just off to create new worlds at fashion college and Tina Gray is her grandmother, lost in her own private world of memories.

It's not quite perfect as a play – the second half dances precariously around as it loses sight of what it is trying to do, while there are performances that become a touch too obviously emotional and lose their naturalism. But it comes back.

And it deals with the central tragedy so profoundly and sympathetically that, while it might move its audience, it is certainly not distressing.

Indeed, despite the occasionally audible sob during Saturday night's performance, the normally voluble first-night audience were moved to a rare silence at the play's finish.

Run ends April 10