Low Down

 "Two women were put in an institution in the 1920s for being 'morally crippled' - one had an illegitimate child, the other was quite eccentric - and they stayed there for 50 years.  Award-winning playwright Charlotte Jones charts the remarkable story of these two real young women."

Review

Charlotte Jones'  (perhaps best known now for writing the book for The Woman in White) first play is a curious beast.   It is very ambitious in its choice of material and scope.  It contains moments of beautiful, perceptive writing.  

The subject matter is harrowing and ideally suited to dramatic adaptation.  Taken as a whole, though, it is puzzlingly unsatisfying. It's hard to explain exactly why the detached, episodic nature of the play failed to work for me without revealing the 'twist' at the end, if it could be called that.  Suffice to say that this simply did not justify the contrived structure of the play.  

I also wonder how much of the plot - flitting backwards and forwards a period of over 50 years, with very little to distinguish the different scenes -  would have been picked up by someone who had not read the press notes beforehand. Furthermore, the dialogue is frequently jarring.  No real sense of period detail is evoked - we are meant to believe, for example, that a frail debutante in the 1920s would come out with neologisms such as "I think you've mistaken me for someone who gives a damn."  

This is a real problem in a piece that is, after all, about the passage of time and its effect on the relationship between two of society's 'outsiders' trying desperately to fashion a place for themselves in a world that has no easy answers for them. The piece works best when it tells the story of the relationship between the two ladies simply and clearly, allowing the chemistry between the two actors to blossom.  

They play off each other sensitively and with a fine sense of dramatic pacing. Georgina Carrigan is clearly a first-rate actor, and managed to find hidden depths in the role of Persephone/ Porph - vulnerable and thoroughly believable.   Eleanor Boyce - a warm, powerful voice and a striking stage presence - made as much as she could out of the 'eccentric' militaristic Dora / Dorph - but the role was severely underwritten, and rarely rose above the caricature.

It's a testament to the skill of these two actors that they managed to hold the audience's attention throughout, and to evoke some genuine pathos (and black humour) from such uneven material. They, and their company, deserve better, and I hope that in the future we will see them performing material more worthy of their considerable talents.   Worth seeing for their performances alone.

Reviewed by EH 05 Aug 2008

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