If you’ve ever wondered what
Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
might look like if it had been written by Enda Walsh, wonder no longer.
Alice Birch, the actual playwright here, acknowledges the debt of her
early piece (now revised) to Walsh’s propensity “to lock [his
characters] in rooms and let them go nuts”, which is more or less what
happens here. The obsessive ritual, the arrival of an outsider who
forces a fundamental re-evaluation, even the collapse of one of the
walls that enclose the location, are all Walshian tropes. In the case
of
Little Light these are
overlaid on the basic situation of a couple permanently grieving for a
lost child and taking out the years of festering negativity on a pair
of guests. The only difference to the setup of
…Virginia Woolf? is that Birch’s
couple, unlike Edward Albee’s, are mourning an actual child rather than
an imaginary one.
Birch’s style of dialogue, however, is very much her own. As she showed
in her piece
Revolt. She said.
Revolt again. for the RSC last year, she has a keen ear for
natural spoken rhythms, and an ability to keep her characters
conversing rapidly whilst inhabiting quite separate, and identifiable,
psychological landscapes. The opening scene here shows off these skills
to fine effect, in which Teddy attempts to open up their coastal
farmhouse to let in both literal and metaphorical light, whilst Alison
(a fearsomely focused Lorna Brown) remains dedicated to her own
suffering and to sharing it with all comers. Alison’s sister Clarissa,
arriving for an annual dinner of recrimination, has had the effrontery
to become pregnant herself, and is moreover followed by her boyfriend
(the ever-excellent Paul Hickey), who has the patience of a saint, but
even that is not inexhaustible. David Mercatali, who has made a name by
directing the work of Philip Ridley, keeps both the pace and the
emotional pitch well up; Madeleine Girling wraps the entire Orange Tree
in-the-round space in builders’ polythene, which both indicates the
work in progress on the farmhouse and blurs the edges of the
psychological space.
Written for the Financial
Times.