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Family trauma on a biblical scale
BROOKLYN
Cock Tavern Theatre
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
Saint Paul’s summation of his life’s work and faith from II Timothy 4:7 acts as the pithy refrain that haunts Brooklyn at the Cock Tavern theatre. Its multiplicity of readings are dextrously teased out in its repeated incantation by different characters.
It is first heard from the lips of Brian, your average Fugazi t-shirt clad indie-kid. He gets as far as “finished” before his memory lets him down.
When it is spoken again by his coke-head father, Saul, the circumstances couldn’t be more different.
Squeezed into a tight structure of two longish scenes and a epilogue, this play is host to a maelstrom of seemingly rambling, expletive-ridden and circular dialogue.
The first scene, featuring teenage brother and sister Lindsay and Brian, is rapid, but the pace sags with the appearance of their father Saul and his lengthy recollections. Joyful and free when they are alone, the siblings become irritable in this agitated, self-aggrandising drug-abuser’s presence.
A family coping with the trauma of a shared loss and their individual battles with guilt, self-loathing and regret sounds maudlin and oppressive. It is, which is, of course, the point.
The opening, expletive-ridden banter is Tarantino-esque in its enterprise in inventing ever more ingenious compounds of genital-referencing abuse. The payoff comes after slightly too much of the rambling father. The play seemed in a rush to finish when interest had finally been roused.
Apart from these few tics there’s much to commend in this sharply accurate portrayal of modern family dysfunctionality that refreshingly steers clear of the obvious, as well as of the dangerous temptation of sentimental moralising.
Until September 26
08444 771 000 |
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