The Mother at the Tricycle Theatre is by Florian Zeller, a French novelist and playwright in his mid-30s who has won many awards in France and been regularly produced in Europe. He writes about a middle-aged woman suffering from acute depression. As with Zeller’s companion piece, The Father, there is no certainty, only ambiguity, when it comes to deciding what is real and what is imagined.
Most of the action is going on in the mother’s disturbed and deteriorating mind. Gina McKee, as the ultra-possessive mum who can’t let her grown-up son go, is fragile, vulnerable and poignant. Laurence Boswell directs and the English translation is by Christopher Hampton.
Owen Sheers, Welsh novelist, poet and playwright, wrote the book for The Two Worlds of Charlie F, which was based on interviews with soldiers returning from Afghanistan. He later turned his original interviews into a radio-commissioned drama in blank verse, Pink Mist.
Three soldiers, three friends – mere boys, 19-year-olds with no better job on offer – go to war and lose their legs, minds and life. The play is about the traumas they and their families endure physically and psychologically when they come home.
John Retallack and George Mann’s production, originally seen at the Bristol Old Vic and now at Bush Theatre, is chiefly notable for its choreography and synchronised mime, which is performed by an ensemble of six with considerable physical skill to extremely effective soundscapes.
Caryl Churchill’s highly elliptical 55-minute Escaped Alone at Royal Court Theatre takes place in a back garden over a number of afternoons; but the action is continuous. The audience eavesdrops on the conversation of four women in their 70s. Sally (Deborah Findlay) has a phobia about cats. Lena (Kika Markham) suffers from agoraphobia and wants to be invisible.
Vi (June Watson) accidentally-on-purpose killed her husband and went to prison for six years. Mrs Jarrett (Linda Bassett) drops in for tea and then regularly steps outside the frame to deliver, with aplomb, a series of extraordinary surreal monologues which catalogue apocalyptic disasters.
The dialogue is largely formed of incomplete, mundane sentences which must have been extremely difficult for the actors to learn. Fortunately, James Macdonald is an expert when it comes to directing Caryl Churchill’s plays and the acting is faultless.
Anna Jordan’s award-winning Yen, a tender and violent story of brotherly love, is directed by Ned Bennett on a traverse stage at Royal Court Upstairs. Two brothers (Alex Austin and Jake Davies), aged 16 and 13 respectively, one downbeat, the other upbeat, abandoned by their parents, live in a grotty room playing video games and watching porn. Mum (Sian Breckin), an alcoholic and diabetic, pays an occasional visit. She can barely look after herself, let alone her children, who have different fathers. A 16-year-old Welsh girl (Annes Elwy), a dog-lover, befriends them and momentarily transforms the boys’ lives just by being kind.
Davies and Austin may not be 13 and 16 but they are still remarkably convincing as teenagers. Davies, as the one who is normally loving and cheerful, is very moving when he is pleading with his brother to let him keep their vicious and malnourished Alsatian dog.
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