Bookish brilliance! The new Dead Poets Society.
Nominated for six Tony Awards, this UK premiere of Adam Rapp’s spellbinding play stars Merchant Ivory’s Madeleine Potter and The Kite Runner’s (Broadway) Eric Sirakian. From director of Psychodrama Matt Wilkinson.
Beverley Baird is the unmarried and childless, cat lady, Yale creative writing professor, who tells her students to write with economy and let the reader’s imagination do the heavy lifting. Writing that your character has the ‘eyes of a star-faced mole’, or ‘a mean mouth, like a half-healed axe scar’, will tell your reader more than a page and a half full of flowery description.
In reality, she is resigned to the fact that creative writing is all but dead and that her students are more interested in social media than Dostoevsky. That is until a brilliant but rebellious freshman student, who doesn’t have a phone and doesn’t like Emails, appears. He asks why she has no friends. She says she plays tennis, but cannot actually say what her opponents names are. Names are overrated!
Thus starts an unlikely friendship, which feels like more than friendship, despite their gaping age gap. The erotic charge which exists between them transcends age, it is a passion of the intellect, a connection between the pages instead of between the sheets. She likens herself to, a decorative plate mounted on a wall, and he admits, I’m about as sexually active as your average, run of the mill, parking meter.
At one point she admits that, Reading a book is like a kind of adultery.
A play that sucks you in slowly but surely, with the quality of the dense script and acting and with the barest of sets, a master class in minimalism with superlative lighting and sound that just screams class. Madeleine Potter’s intense and nuanced central performance is a gift, I doubt I will see better on the Fringe this year.
The twisted and convoluted ending has the whole audience gasping, wordless and tearful, twice over! A play that plays, with more questions than answers, and that does not seek to tie things into pretty bows, and that will have you thinking long and hard, long after it ends!
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 10th August 2024
North West End UK Rating:
Running time – 1hrs 20 mins
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