After a quarter of a century, the story of the western hostages seized in Lebanon in the 1980s has faded from popular memory. What remains is Frank McGuinness's classic play about three men incarcerated in a cellar, now given a superb revival at Southwark Playhouse by Jessica Swale's Red Handed Theatre Company.
I can't compare it with the original production two decades ago and I've never read the script, so I came to it last night without any preconceptions, except for my memory of the original events. In the 1990s I think I would have seen the play more as a journalist, thinking 'This could have been me'. Now I'm more fascinated by the brilliance of the dialogue and the structure of the play. McGuinness uses only a minimum of backstory about each of the men, and he leaves their captors offstage entirely. The politics of the Lebanese civil war are completely absent, and the past and possible future lives of the hostages are secondary. What remains is the intensity of the present and the psychology of the interaction within the darkened space, intensified by the power of language. As Jessica Swale points out in her programme notes, this is a play about the human spirit and the power of imagination. By imagining horse races, tennis matches, films -- anything to fight the crushing isolation of their dirty cell -- the men fend off the darkness, though they bruise each other in the process. The question of how permanently they will be damaged if and when they are released isn't explored in depth.
With all three men chained to the wall and unable to move more than a few paces, and with no furniture except a radiator, a ledge, three blankets and a plastic crate, this production offers definitive proof that the power of theatre doesn't lie in swanky sets, but in good acting and directing. The performances by Billy Carter, Robin Soans and Joseph Timms are exhilarating to watch, particularly Soans as a middle-aged professor of old English trying to salvage his stiff upper lip and his dignity after being seized on the street while shopping for pears. This is one of the best stage performances I've seen this year. The lighting design by Christopher Nairne and the atmospheric surroundings of Southwark Playhouse, with its dirty brick arches and rumble of overhead trains, reinforce the intensity of McGuinness's writing and Swale's briskly paced direction, which responds to the play's subtle changes of mood while never tipping over into sentimentality or melodrama. Go and see it!
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