THE EDGE OF OUR BODIES
Gate Theatre, London W11
  Opened 29 September, 2014
***

One can faintly resent Shannon Tarbet’s abilities as an actress. It seems indefinably improper that someone should be so skilled at delivering such a nuanced performance at such a relatively young age (she is 22) and without university or conservatoire training. Of course, director Christopher Haydon has a keen eye for the minutiae of a performance, but nevertheless, for Tarbet to take such direction so naturally, so early, makes her almost offensively good.
         
As the first play in the Gate’s “Who Does She Think She Is?” programme of female-centred meditations on identity, Adam Rapp’s all-but-monologue (a second character appears for five or so of the 75 minutes) fits the template of the season as well as that of the playwright’s preferred modus operandi. As often with Rapp, a protagonist’s trip to New York symbolises the possibility of escape from their stultifying everyday, but a possibility seldom if ever realised. In the case of 16-year-old Bernadette, bunking off from her New England school, she fails to find her boyfriend or tell him that she is pregnant, has a sordid, empty sexual encounter with an older man, and finds less transcendence in the city than in contemplation of her imminent school production of Genet’s The Maids.
         
The story is told from Bernadette’s journal, and Tarbet begins perched on a stool, obviously (or so it seems) reading: she is spot on with the artificial cadence patterns and phrase breaks and those strange, unexpected tics of response when you encounter an unremembered twist in what you’ve written. About a third of the way in, she jettisons the book prop (whose pages she has “accidentally” let us see, so that we know its content is handwritten and doodle-encrusted rather than consisting of pages of the printed script pasted in) as the character gives herself over more to direct memory.
         
As with the early monologue work of Conor McPherson such as Rum And Vodka, the modest heft of the play comes from the relationship between the events recounted and the ostensibly unfussy, low-key portrait of the narrator. In this respect Tarbet is all but flawless: she even has the precision, when Bernadette is hamming up passages of Genet, to get her English-actorly accent wrong in plausibly American ways. This undistinguished rite-of-passage story is given point and purpose by the meticulous portrayal of not just the protagonist’s experiences, but the insecurities of a personality still in formation: of who she thinks she is, but also who she really is.
    
Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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