Theatre reviews: Orphans

Published on Monday 10 August 2009 19:13

ORPHANS TRAVERSE THEATRE (VENUE 15)

IN A modest house somewhere in London, a couple are having a candlelit dinner together. They are Helen and Danny, and they are celebrating the fact that Helen is pregnant for the second time. But their evening is brutally interrupted by the sudden arrival of Helen's brother Liam, his T-shirt soaked in blood.

This is what happens in the opening seconds of Dennis Kelly's Orphans – a Traverse co-production with Birmingham Rep and Paines Plough that represents the only full-scale new play on the Edinburgh theatre's main stage this year – and it announces a grim, thoughtful and beautifully-structured two-hour drama about something like the end of our civilisation; or at least of its capacity to believe in itself, and to reproduce itself with any conviction.

Like Sarah Kane's iconic 1996 play Blasted, Orphans deploys the image of a war on the street bursting into a comfortable middle-class interior. But in Kelly's case, the war is not some military conflict, but the familiar domestic battle between law and anarchy on the streets. The clearer it becomes that Liam's original story of helping a wounded man is a lie, and that he has in fact carried out a brutal racist attack, the more Danny wrestles with the question of whether he should call the police. Helen, meanwhile, in the grip of some visceral code of family loyalty, bullies and shrieks her husband into becoming an accessory to Liam's crime.

To say that this is ugly stuff is to understate the case; but no-one who spends even just five minutes a day with the British news media can fail to notice just how precisely Kelly captures the hidden domestic backbeat of our times; the ugly rhetoric of cynicism about the law, and generalised ill-focused sense of victimhood, that can – in a flash – become a justification for every kind of savage street violence.

I'm not certain that Kelly has quite found the dramatic form that fully expresses the play's fundamental struggle between patient civic community-building and violent, destructive despair – there's a familiar, cop-show slickness about the play's doom-laden tone that is far more reactionary than it is radical.

But Kelly is a serious playwright with plenty to say about the way we live now, often blinded by our own nightmares; and Roxana Silbert's beautifully-paced production features three terrifyingly persuasive performances: from Claire-Louise Cordwell as Helen, Jonathan McGuinness as Danny, and Joe Armstrong as Liam, the racist psychopath who, in his own bruised mind, never meant any harm at all

Orphans until 30 August, today 10:15am;