At the Table & Almost Nothing ( Archived )

Reviews

Pictured L to R: Ewan Stewart and Nina Sosanya (ALMOST NOTHING); Karl Johnson, Jonathan Timmins, Robert Timmins, Ewan Stewart (AT THE TABLE).

Photography by Alastair Muir

The Royal Court likes to call itself the National Theatre of New Writing, and should perhaps retitle itself the International Theatre of New Writing. In Vassily Sigarev and the Presnyakov Brothers it has given stage-room to Russian playwrights of whom Russians themselves were unaware, and now here it is again, repeating the feat on the other side of the world. You can’t see Marcos Barbosa’s double bill without knowing that the theatre has discovered and developed a young Brazilian dramatist of considerable potential.

Considerable subtlety and considerable darkness, too. Both plays involve misused and dead boys; Almost Nothing the casual shooting of a child who, the killers claim, wanted to mug them, At the Table sexual abuse at an outdoor-adventure camp and its fatal aftermath. The first is, I suppose, the more alien piece, since even in Blunkett’s Britain slum kids aren’t yet pray to vigilantes, maverick policeman or passing motorists, as they are in parts of South America. The second’s subject is sadly familiar and can’t be disowned even by the most complacent of us.

At first I found the dialogue of Almost Nothing mannered, but this is largely because Ewan Stewart’s Antonio and Nina Sosanya’s Sara are distancing themselves from some unidentified worry. So why does he have ringing in the ears? Why is she wary of retribution? Well, there has been a big bang. Actually, he has shot a child who came to their car window.

Enter Lorna Gayle as the boy’s mother, angry, bitter, but willing to accept their bribe for her silence. Enter Karl Johnson as a genial, helpful gentleman who is happy to do anything at all to ensure that the silence is permanent.

Melodramatic stuff? The very opposite. The killers don’t seem vicious, the would-be-hit-man simply takes for granted that some people are worth “almost nothing.” In its quiet, tense way – Roxana Silbert’s direction deserves credit here – the production is a devastating indictment of an urban world in which the abnormal is so normal that shrugs, sad smiles and talk of tinnitus are sufficient acknowledgement of child-murder.

That fine actor Karl Johnson appears in equally affable guise in At the Table, this time as a scoutmaster chatting to a new recruit about the terrific fun the “lads” are having at his summer camp. Subsequent scenes intensify, then confirm your initial suspicions but, even when Barbosa fast-forwards the action by 20 years and introduces memories of rectal bleeding and suicide into the equation, the dialogue remains as understated as it’s loaded, edgy, dangerous.

The price is a slight lack of clarity and plausibilty but that’s worth paying for the last scene, when a victim speechlessly confronts Johnson’s now elderly paedophile in a caf near a playground, and discovers a litigious man whose myth is that he is kind, loving and wronged. A play to chill British spines too? I think so.

The Times *3 stars Wednesday February 11, Benedict Nightingale

Silbert’s direction is pitch-perfect: we hang on every word I welcome this season for its quest to widen our horizons. And when it brings us plays like this Barbosa double-bill, the traces of which keep gathering in power in my head, I record my real gratitude.

Financial Times

Wednesday February 11, Alastair Macauley

wonderful Barbosa strikes me as a hot, highly individual new talent.

The Evening Standard

Tuesday February 10, Nicholas de Jongh

Barbosa has organised these two plays beautifully, concentrating on the aftermath rather than the event, evoking a modern world defined by moral ambivalence and buried feelings. Roxana Silbert’s efficiently directed, well-acted productions capture the disaster lying below the surface.

Metro

Wednesday February 11, Claire Allfree

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