Theatre reviews: Everything Else Happened, Assembly Roxy (Venue 139)

By SUSAN MANSFIELD
Published on 07/08/2012 12:48

IT’S a coup for two young British directors, David Kantounas and Adam Lenson, to have secured the first stage rights to four short stories by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Everything Else Happened

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139)

Rating: ***

It is both a gift and a challenge for their company, Dream Epic. This is writing so lively that it dances off the page, yet how to stage it without losing the magic of Foer’s original prose?

Patti Love does well as Rhoda, the batty Jewish granny whose monologue mixes homilies with racism, as does Harry Ditson as the bittersweet magician in If the Ageing Magician Should Begin to Believe. Yet somehow they never quite become the multidimensional characters that Foer’s words create in the imagination.

Here we Aren’t, so Quickly is a post-mortem on a marriage written as a series of pithy non sequiturs, but it struggles to breathe here as a clumsy interchange between a man and a tape recorder. A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease, written in the style of a mock presentation, is the most successful, perhaps because it adapts to performance most naturally. The end result is not quite the stories, not quite a play either, but on the positive side, the words still dance.

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