#leo butler

[davidralf]

Decades - Leo Butler - Ovalhouse

★★★ review for The Stage.

[theatrebubble]

Boy at the Almeida Theatre

Boy at the Almeida Theatre

If we really needed anyone to tell us, the outlook for 16 year-old boys leaving school with few qualifications is bleak. The world premiere of Leo Butler’s Boy at the Almeida very effectively takes us on a tour through a day in the life of Liam, a young man at a loss to know what to do. The vehicle which allows this is a continuously moving travelator, which winds it way around the stage with the…

View On WordPress

[davidralf]

The Early Bird - Leo Butler - The Lion and Unicorn

Every year in the UK around 140,000 children go missing. Aside from the very few cases picked up by the media, behind this statistic lurk hundreds of thousands of parents, guardians and friends suffering quietly, waiting fervently, and blaming themselves and each other.

In Leo Butler’s The Early Bird the missing daughter’s parents are not drawn from the public grief of Kate and Gerry McCann. Rather Debbie and Jack are trapped in a private storm of recrimination and re-enactment, obsessed by the days that led up to their daughter Kimberley’s disappearance on her way to school one morning. The action in the text is intentionally frustrating and cyclical, as these two people try to drag each other out of their torpor, only to slip back into obsessing over the details of the last time the saw their child. But even over the course of a swift 45-minute play this frustrating structure needs to be matched with a canny directorial hand to guide the audience through repetition after repetition.

Zoe Thomas-Webb skilfully ups the ante throughout, increasing the tension between daytime telly addict Debbie (Kate Sketchley) and newly-promoted Jack (Thom Petty) as the text takes off – the pair collude to rehearse their last conversations with Kimberley, and invent fantastical adventures for the young girl, while disagreeing on the simplest details – was it raining or sunny, the day she left? Sketchley has the more demanding role here, and convinces, but both actors struggle with range, and only just pull off the emotional arc required of these young parents driven to distraction.

The text is the star attraction here, as dark thoughts are vocalised, criss-crossing and short-circuiting between the two characters. Design choices have been key in this 2006 play – a production at the Finborough Theatre in 2010 encased its actors in a glass cage, physically isolating them from all comfort and assistance. In this production, in a brilliantly affecting touch, the logic of all the conflicting sadness and blame is beautifully embodied in the set design: a section of staircase covered with cartoon animal stickers and a simply carpeted landing provide the acting space – in the space under the stairs are boxes and boxes of children’s toys. The horror of the play is that Debbie and Jack can afford neither to dwell in grief, nor move on from it. They are trapped in the present, boxed in with Kimberley’s toys, and with no resources to escape. A dark, entertaining production.

★★★

Runs until 30th March 2013.

For The Public Reviews.