Breath, Boom ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) Diane Parish as Prix, Martina Laird as Malika, Michelle Austin as Angel, Adjoa Andoh as Mother

Production photography by Ray Burmiston

Direction: Gemma Bodinetz, Design: Laura Hopkins, Lighting: Jenny Kagan, Sound: Paul Arditti

Cast: Adjoa Andoh, Michele Austin, Rakie Ayola, Martina Laird, Petra Letang, Amelia Lowdell, Kim Oliver, Diane Parish, Howard Sadler, Marsha Thomason

MAEVE WALSH, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, 27 February 2000

“Breath, Boom, which follows 14 years in the life of Prix (Diane Parish), a black female gang leader, is nothing if not incendiary drama. It opens with violent feuding in the Bronx and a recalcitrant gang member getting a (not so) good kicking from her “sisters”. She’s saved from pulping when Prix is distracted by a firework display over the city: the 16 year-old Prix has an obsession with their colours and controlled chaos and, in-between planning drive-by shootings to order, she indulges a schoolgirl passion for arts and crafts by modelling explosive showers out of pipe cleaners.

“Gemma Bodinetz’s controlled direction highlights, but never exaggerates, this disturbing mismatch of age and experience… Corthron refuses to judge or moralise. Social and domestic factor which might explain Prix’s choices are only hinted at, and the characters explain little about their motivation. The matter-of-factness is both alien and involving, particularly in Parish’s chilly performance. Throughout Prix’s life experiences – detention, counselling, drug-running, jail – it’s always the other characters who talk the talk. But it’s Parish’s steely expressionlessness which makes her the magnetic focus.”

Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN

“Corthron remains intruigingly ambivalent about Prix. She shows her violence to stem, in part, from her domestic back-ground … Prix is also the product of a culture in which male, middle-aged violence is either exculpated or seen as the social norm. But, just when you think Corthron is going soft on her heroine, she reminds you that she is an extremely cold fish: while in jail she rehearses a deeply sincere speech for the benefit of her captors – “my home was violent, my teachers suspicious, potential employers uninterested” – that she herself greets with derisive laughter.

“Corthron pins down the mixed motives that drive teenage gangsters: she also shows how they are supplanted by even more ruthless successors… My one criticism of Gemma Bodinetz’s excellent production is that it treats Prix’s park-square Fourth of July firework display too much as a climactic spectacle. Otherwise everything reeks of authenticity and Diane Parish’s Prix is eye-opening: I’ve rarely seen such a gimlet-eyed authority in young actress. Marsha Thomas as a suicide-prine cellmate, Rakie Ayola as a terrified gang member and Adjoa Andoh as Prix’s mother lend striking support in a play that takes you behind the headlines to examine a disturbing social phenomenon with unblinking honesty.”

Paul Taylor, INDEPENDENT, 28 February 2000

“Breath, Boom is not a piece most of us would be prepared to research without heavy police protection, and God knows how Corthron did the necessary legwork, but one of its solid virtues is the way it gets right inside the experiences of these girls. The tone of Breath, Boom is largely the tone of its characters: ballsy, streetwise, and contemptuously unamazed by a world where it’s par for the course never to have known your father and to be raped at five by the lover of your mother who is later flung in jail for his murder where she develops a drug-habit and AIDS. This is the CV of the central figure, Prix, who in Diane Parish’s compelling performance, confronts existence with a sullen, ice-queen glower, converting pain into calm ruthlessness as she goes in and out of jail, takes up crack dealing and stonily refuses to make contact with her mother. It would be easy for a play like this to come across as cultural tourism… But Corthron does not pour liberal solicitude over these girls. Whatever the political agenda the play has must, admirably, be deduced on the wing.”