OneTouch Theatre, 30 April 2009

Zoe Thorne in Spoonface Steinberg (© Beggars and Kings, 2009)

TRANSFERRING a work from one medium to another is a process fraught with difficulty. It is a rare stage play which, when adapted for the screen, manages to burst out of the confines of the wooden “O” where it was initially conceived. Adapting books to stage or screen necessitates stripping plotlines to the minimum in order to allow audiences home at a decent hour.

Spoonface Steinberg is also a transferred work; it started out twelve years ago as a radio play (by Lee Hall, writer of Billy Elliot) or, strictly speaking, a dramatic monologue aimed at giving the audience some insight into the workings of the autistic mind. It was so popular that thousands of cassettes (doesn’t technology date fast nowadays?) were bought by listeners.

However, despite being adapted for the stage, it is still basically a radio play. The action is confined to the hospital room in which Spoonface is dying of cancer. Whatever she does, whether sprawling on her bed, arranging cassettes in a pattern on the rug or closing her bowl of cereal in the wardrobe, her movements are generally interchangeable and none of them really advances the action of the play at all.

That said, in the title role, young Zoe Thorne gives an assured, highly commendable performance – 90 minutes on stage alone is a gruelling prospect for any actor – and there is nothing to quibble about in the direction (Michael Fentiman) or design.

But ultimately it is a curiously unmoving evening. A child, dying of cancer, born autistic, discoursing on God and man, feminism and Judaism, artlessly revealing her and her family’s story to us – somewhere it ought to have jerked a few tears, but I sat through it dry-eyed.

My neighbours in the OneTouch were teachers who said that they wished they had seen the play sooner, as they, like most nowadays, were coping with pupils on the autistic spectrum. For them it was educational, which is a praiseworthy result, and may be one of the reasons for the enduring popularity of this piece, but for this reviewer it felt irritatingly contrived.

“There are no real ends, only middles”, says Spoonface. I have rarely been gladder to reach the end.

© Jennie Macfie, 2009

Links

• Beggars and Kings

• Eden Court Theatre

• Jennie Macfie