Writer: Alistair McDowall
Directors: Sam Pritchard and Vicky Featherstone
The first of Alistair McDowall’s three monologues, Northleigh, 1940, begins as if someone is telling you their latest nightmare in excruciating detail and it ends with a scrabble of words as if they have been plucked from James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses. But sandwiched in the middle is a touching story of a father and a daughter bonding while waiting for the bombs to fall in the Second War World. Like the other two of McDowall’s monologues, the loneliness of the characters cuts like a knife.
Rather than monologues, McDowall has called them poems and looking at them in the playtext it’s not hard to disagree. Arranged in stanzas or in prose, the lines almost fall off the pages. At times, with the way that the words are arranged on paper, the short plays resemble concrete poetry, a mind that is breaking up into pieces. On the page, the poems defy dramatization.
McDowall says that he wrote these three plays with actor Kate O’Flynn in mind, even unconsciously when he first put pen to paper in a retreat in New Hampshire which resulted in all of it, the last play on stage at the Royal Court. O’Flynn suits McDowall’s style in the same manner Thora Hird understood the subtle cadences of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. But even in saying that O’Flynn is integral to these pieces, it would be interesting to see these plays, especially In Stereo, featuring another actor and another director.
As it is, O’Flynn and director Sam Pritchard wring out every ounce of humour from McDowall’s words, but In Stereo is an essay on solitude that perhaps deserves a more serious approach. In it, O’Flynn’s character, an older woman who lives alone in a house, spots a damp mark on the bedroom wallpaper. During the night she senses that it is growing incrementally, but the sounds she hears actually come from downstairs. What she finds downstairs is shocking.
It continues like a ghost story, a horror story even, with clear echoes of Beckett’s Winnie from Happy Days. Of course, this story of a woman stuck in her house – and her room is bleakly designed by Merle Hensel – is meant to be absurd but such an undercurrent of sadness runs through it that it could be could be staged more austerely.
The final and longest monologue and directed by Vicky Featherstone is all of it. It certainly lives up to its name. Sitting on a stool next to a table like 70s comedian Dave Allen, O’Flynn tells the story of another woman, but underneath the stand-up routine lies another life full of sorrows. This woman’s life is very similar to our own, and this is what keeps the audience’s interest. O’Flynn is incredible here, never missing a beat, as she counts on her fingers the many times she has to say ‘driving to work’. There are no surprises in all of it. Indeed, you could say that it is pretty obvious. But life is.
Runs until 17 June 2023
