| Theatre Reviews THEATRE
REVIEW
The Hour of the Lynx
By Chris Jackson
The Hour of the Lynx — Swedish playwright Per Olov Enquist’s exploration
of a damaged mind — is a work of profoundly compassionate understanding.
And to realise it on stage requires equal understanding from director and
cast.
Happily, in this moving production by the Bristol-based Stepping Out
Theatre Company, this is achieved. Director Steve Hennessy has himself worked
in the field of mental illness and written several successful plays on that
theme; and the cast rehearsed and gave the first performance of this production
inside Barrow Gurney Psychiatric Hospital. The result is one of the most
poignant and sensitive depictions of a mind in turmoil that you are at present
likely to see in the theatre.
The play follows Enquist’s hallmark technique of attempting to reconstruct
an event — in this case the apparently motiveless killing of two people
by a young man (the Boy, played by Seb Steiger).
Those seeking to understand what happened — Lisbeth (Rebecca Adamson),
the psychiatrist assigned to the Boy, now in a secure unit, and a female
pastor (Ros Liddiard) — have also to unravel why an experiment (the gift
to the Boy of a cat) has gone terribly wrong.
Lisbeth is unflinchingly condemnatory: The Boy deserves to be punished.
The Pastor, however, seeks to find the damaged personality behind the
murderous façade. She is no mere bleeding heart though. The journey into
the Boy’s psychosis costs her dear but she perseveres. What she (and the
audience) discovers lies at the heart of Enquist’s meditation on the redemptive
power of love, and the desire to relate this to a loving God (or, if one
wishes a secular version, the human instinct to love).
Assisted by Colin Williams’s simple set design — delicate white struts,
fragile as sanity, delineating the confines of the Boy’s cell — and Andrew
Williams’s expressive lighting, the cast are uniformly excellent. Seb Steiger’s
Boy, however, dominates the production. Sometimes guileless as a six-year-old
sometimes all too capable of brutal violence and always staggered by the
others’ inability to understand, he inhabits the role totally, provoking
compassion and incomprehension by turn. His paradoxical achievement, as
a murderer, is to make us reflect, in Larkin’s words, on our almost-instinct:
What will survive of us is love.
Starring Sebastian Steiger, Rebecca Adamsom and Ros Liddiard.
For further information contact
www.steppingouttheatre.co.uk.
THEATRE PREVIEW
The Rivals
By Grainne McLoughlin
Christopher Morahan’s new play is set to rival any other current stage
production.
Aptly entitled The Rivals and penned by Richard Sheridan the play has
all the ingredients of a fantastic British/Irish comedy.
But this tale of love and intrigue is particularly poignant as its revival
celebrates the Theatre Royal Bath’s 200th anniversary.
And the play itself does well evoke the very hustle and bustle of the
fashionable spa city of Bath.
The Rivals — described as one of the funniest jewels of late-Restoration
comedy — also boasts everything from mistaken identity, conniving servants,
amourous confusion and laughter whilst featuring some hugely memorable comic
characters including Mrs. Malaprop — renowned for her hilarious verbal eccentricity.
Also included are Sir Anthony Absolute — who has a parental short fuse
and a wit to match, love-breathing 17-year-old Lydia Languish, Bob Acres
— the country booby of Clod Hall and the incendiary Irishman Sir Lucius
O’Trigger.
Starring: Stephanie Cole and George Baker.
The Rivals runs for one week only, from November 14-19. It will later
appear at London’s Richmond Theatre From November 28-December 3.
For further information contact Bath’s box office on 01223 503333 and
for the Richmond run contact 0870 060 6651.
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