Where Do We Live ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L TO R) Nicholas Aaron (Howard), Toby Dantzic (Ron) and Susannah Wise (Patricia); Adam Garcia (Tyler), Daniel Evans (Stephen); Daniel Evans (Stephen), Susannah Wise (Patricia)

Photography by John Haynes.

Direction: Richard Wilson, Design: Julian McGowan, Lighting: Johanna Town, Sound: Paul Arditti, Composer: Olly Fox

Cast: Nicholas Aaron, Anthony Clarke, Toby Dantzic, Daniel Evans, Adam Garcia,Cyril Nri, Ray Panthaki, Jemima Rooper, Susannah Wise

‘Where people ask, are the post-September 11 plays? The young American writer, Christopher Shinn, answers the question by offering a wry, quizzical look at New York lives before and after. His conclusions are suitably mixed: on a personal level, people may have been drawn together by catastrophe, but politically, America shifted even further to the right.

‘In a sense, Shinn’s purpose is clear: to show that even before 9/11 America was deeply divided. Stephen inhabits a hedonistic world where businessmen in bars are as recklessly individualistic as the gay men in clubs and at parties; and , if drugs are a recreation for the clubbers, they are a form of economic survival for the black family across the hall.

‘ Shinn takes a scalpel to privileged selfishness, and partly because Richard Wilson directs the sexually explicit action with verve.

‘As the hero, Daniel Evans shows a remarkable capacity for conveying anger through a deceptively beneficent smile. And the support is excellent: Adam Garcia as his lover exudes sleek self-admiration; Noel Clarke is full of sullen reticence as a drug dealer who despises his trade; and Jemima Rooper is spot on as a refugee from Chorley Wood. Shinn offers a refreshingly caustic report from the front line.’

The Guardian

‘Where do we live is set in downtown Manhattan between July and October 2001. Most of the action takes place in two apartments on the same floor, and for a long time it just seems an exercise in fragmented sociology and suspense. The inhabitants of two different apartments on the same floor of the same apartment building are seen in their different lives. Will Stephen and Tyler remain lovers? Will Shed stop pushing drugs? Is Shed’s apparent homophobia serious, and does it mask his own gay inclinations? Larger issues loom into view – Mayor Giuliani, the welfare act, life in New York for the disabled – but for a long time it remains very nicely ambiguous as to whether Stephen, the most featured character, is right to take the aggressively liberal stand he does on these and other issues; and the play seems more focused on its private lives.

‘Suddenly we realise that the later scenes of the play occur two, three, four weeks after September 11; and we realise the change in the climate of these New York lives. And it’s that sex scene that clinches this. The way that Sephen, in medias res, suddenly withdraws is powerful rather in the way that is when the hero of Wagner’s Parsifal suddenly withdraws from Kundry’s kiss: suddenly the fates of others loom large in the protagonists minds.’

Financial Times

‘The settings are a bar, a gay club and an apartment block, all of them neatly evoked by Julian McGowan on a central acting area so big that it pushes the audience to the margins, near what is to become Ground Zero.

‘Macho brokers talk brashly about the market. Gay men drift around their come-today, come-tomorrow niterie. A drug dealer grumpily plies his trade. And in the adjoining apartment Daniel Evans’s Stephen, an aspiring writer, is cheerfully unaware that he’s drifting apart from his lover, Adam Garcia’s offhandedly hedonistic Tyler.

‘Two years ago the excellent Evans played a gay American writer called Stephen in Shinn’s Other People at the Court, but, if we are looking at the same character, he has changed a lot. Then he was nerdishly self-absorbed, now he’s acquired socialist-style principles and an earnest empathy, and worries Tyler by giving financial help and practical help to the drug dealer’s cadging, crippled uncle. And Stephen’s angry attack on a camp friend, who believes in self-reliance and detests ‘welfare mothers’, manages to alienate just about everyone, including his lover.

‘Thanks also to Richard Wilson’s direction, Shinn successfully evokes a wary, troubled Lower Manhattan peopled by characters who speak arresting dialogue, You believe in Noel Clarke’s sullen, surly Shed, who sells cocaine, and in his shady friends and contacts: Jemima Rooper as a goofy English drifter from Chorley-wood and Nicholas Aaron as a manic white dude who wears golfing gear and talks pseudo-black argot.

‘What occurs is touching and, since Shinn is careful to end up suggesting that New York will soon lapse back into lovelessness, it does not seem sentimental. There are still plenty of self-seeking maggots in the Big Apple, but there’s juice and nourishment too.’

The Times

‘Where do we live is a letter from America with (and without) love. Christohper Shinn writes with unstinting curiosity, asking what it means to ignore the community in which you live and wondering why empathy seems to be going out of style.

‘ This is a play about frustration – sexual, political and moral. It is no accident that the play’s punctuation-free title does not quite know whether it is a question. Stephen is full of unconsummated thoughts.’

The Observer