Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me

13 Feb 2012 in Dance & Drama, Showcase

Perth Theatre, 11 February 2012

PLAYWRIGHTS like to show us characters under pressure.

THEY have to be careful, however, not to impose so much pressure their characters simply walk off stage. Whatever the dramatic scenario, the characters have to have a reason for putting up with the discomfort and not doing a runner.

Adam (Joseph Chance) and Edward (Stephen Kennedy) (photo Eammon McGoldrick)

Adam (Joseph Chance) and Edward (Stephen Kennedy) (photo Eammon McGoldrick)

In Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, playwright Frank McGuinness has the perfect excuse. As hostages chained up in a miserable cell in the Lebanon, his three characters have no option but to stay. However much they irritate each other, however much they long to be at home, however much they find their situation physically and emotionally intolerable, they can do nothing but remain in their respective corners, talking, exercising, sleeping, passing the time.

Indeed, in this 1992 play inspired by the true story of Brian Keenan and his fellow captives in late-1980s Beirut, McGuinness sets himself the opposite challenge: how to dramatise a situation that is as a boring as it is unpleasant? Like characters in a Samuel Beckett play (or in Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit in which three figures trapped in a no-man’s land discover hell is other people), the hostages Adam, Edward and Michael are deprived of the possibility of dramatic action. Hidden from the light, they can’t even keep track of day and night. Their life is an endless, shapeless wait.

That McGuinness has created such a riveting play out of this unpromising scenario is astonishing. That artistic director Rachel O’Riordan has given it such a superb production in Perth is thrilling.

In a compelling staging, she brings a tremendous sensitivity to the ebb and flow of McGuinness’s writing, drawing forth excellent performances from Joseph Chance as Adam, the athletic American psychologist, Stephen Kennedy as Edward, the cynical Irish journalist, and Robert Morgan as Michael, the buttoned-up English academic.

On a set realised in ugly detail by designer Gary McCann – lit with great subtlety by Chahine Yavroyan – the three men explore not just the awful tension and psychological pressure of a meaningless captivity, but also the cultural backgrounds that have defined and distinguished them. Behind Adam’s confident all-American persona is a man on a knife-edge longing for the security of his family. Behind Edward’s brashness is a man permanently on the run from the religious schisms of Ireland. And behind Michael’s brittle stand-offishness is a history of English restraint and emotional denial.

Consequently, we get a powerful sense of life beyond this miserable cell as well as a fearless examination of human beings under terrible stress. No denying it’s bleak, but O’Riordan ensures it is also vital and human in a production that is tough, assured and irresistible.

© Mark Fisher, 2012

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