Low Down

This clever two hander is relationship drama given a Beckett-like twist.

Review

Gwen is showing John his room at the B&B she runs.  There’s just enough precision in their stilted dialogue to suggest that something clever is going on, a suspicion that's confirmed about ten minutes in when they resume their starting positions and begin again using almost the same words.  -The action so far has been a neat theatrical trick.  We took the scenario at face value when in fact the pair were role playing.

Writer Jennie Coles makes imaginative use of her conceit and paints a detailed picture of their struggling relationship. The importance of the game depends on the seriousness of the players.  John’s contributions get more and more erratic a he loses heart.  Gwen sets the house rules – there’s certain places she won’t go and she sends John back to the beginning for bad behaviour.

A sense of entrapment develops as we watch them repeat the same actions over and over in a doomed attempt to recover their love, but unfortunately neither character quite sticks.  Maybe it’s the fact that we know nothing certain about them after it’s been established that they’re role playing…perhaps we can’t see them as any more than pawns in the play’s exercise with theatrical form.  The dialogue never really comes to life – rare moments of invention are flashes of life in an otherwise very rhetorical and bizarrely old fashioned feeling script.

A well-crafted, intellectually fascinating, but emotionally unsatisfying play.

Reviewed by HC 12.08.07

Website :

Eric Fee Productions (no site found)