Our Late Night ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) Jonathan Cullen as Jim, Stephen Dillane as Tony, Ingrid Lacey as Kristin, Ewan Stewart as Lewis, Andrew Woodall as Grant, Nancy Crane as Annette. Pre-production photography by Joe Dilworth

Production without decor, directed by Caryl Churchill

Creative Assitance: Anthony McDonald, Mauricio Elginaya, Johanna Town, Paul Arditti

Cast: Nancy Crane, Jonathan Cullen, Stephen Dillane, Jacqueline Defferary, Ingrid Lacey, Ewan Stewart, Andrew Woodall

“Without hype and officially without a set, the Royal Court have stolen up on us with Caryl Churchill’s production of her own favourite play, Wallace Shawn’s Our Late Night. The 1975 short has a glint in its eye of the best of Churchill’s work, as Shawn traces the sexual currents flowing round a party in a Manhattan loft apartment… Shawn’s is a satirical portrait of an audaciously shallow, decadent society, obsessed with self-gratification but lacking the imagination to seek it beyond sex. Churchill’s cast play the conversational ronde with worl-weary langour: perhaps their candour is an effort to shock themselves…

“It’s a slight but sharp play, which only belatedly hints at the lonliness that may underpin these adventures in masturbation and burning jelly. It vividly explores the variety of sexual appetites and attitudes, and the difficulty of finding common ground between them. Shawn spices the play with deliciously offbeat and tangential dialogue. Churchill directs with a keen eye and ear for the absurdity and desolation.”

Brian Logan TIME OUT 27 Oc tober

“In the light of Shawn’s more recent plays, such as The Fever and The Designated Mourner, Our Late Night can be seen as a powerful premonition of a dying, Wasp culture hanuted by the tyranny of self and sexual fascism. It is no accident that Tony’s accounts of his prodigious sexual feats takes place in the tropics and starts with the seizure of a native woman: the third world only exists for those well-heeled urbanites as a source of provate satisafaction… A short play, but a savage one.”

Michael Billington THE GUARDIAN 23 October