Writer: Mark Bastin
Director: Matthew Parker
Mark Bastin’s entertaining and impeccably performed slice of neo-Gothic melodrama, The Dawn of Reckoning, follows two former best friends as they resolve long-standing enmities over copious amounts of bourbon in a hotel residents’ lounge. Flickering lights, heavy fog outside, and the offstage shrieks of a skulk of metropolitan foxes suggest there may be more to the locale than first meets the eye. One supposes Batin and director Matthew Parker may be fans of Noël Coward. There are nods to both Blithe Spirit and Fallen Angels here, though the comedy takes a back seat to in-your-face, heart-on-sleeve, urban emotionalism.
Hard-drinking, plain-speaking medic Ruth (Jilly Bond on top form) grows up on a rough council estate in the North and turns into a promiscuous spikey-haired punk. Artsy, home-counties Helena (Bryonie Pritchard, otherworldly suffering writ large) grows up with a mum who thinks make-up is for “actresses and prostitutes”. The odd-couple pair bond at university over cheap booze and a shared disdain for the attentions of posh men.
For years, they are inseparable buddies until Ruth’s charismatic, philandering film director husband, Anthony, leaves her for Helena. Estranged for 25 years, the duo have an apparently chance encounter at 3 am in the deserted bar of a boutique Bayswater hotel (Hannah Williams’s down-at-heels set has more of a 1960s seaside guesthouse vibe).
Anthony has recently died. His ghostly presence hangs over the women as they drink, reminisce, and air a veritable lifetime of bitter regrets and furious recriminations. Helena’s anger camouflages deep pain at the loss of her troubled son James to suicide shortly after her marriage collapsed. Ruth hides hidden guilt over James’s death, too, though in a different way. Drinks will be thrown, secrets will be revealed, and tears will be shed before the evening is out. And those lights keep on flickering.
Bastin’s slow-reveal narrative delivers twists and turns without overburdening the piece with detail, leaving the performers to revel in well-drafted, if a tad archetypal, characters. Pritchard’s glorious Helena evinces the angry ennui of a woman with few friends who has sacrificed almost everything for her high-profile medical career. Bond’s ethereal, artistic Ruth, bedecked in a striking crimson Norma Desmond turban, is cross too, though mostly at Anthony for the loveless marriage she had to endure before his untimely death.
There are a few plot inconsistencies that one has to ignore as past sins and unexpected present circumstances are revealed on the route to the twist in the tale, but the performances are so good and the melodrama so on point that it is easy to overlook them.
Runs until 11 April 2026
