| Ashes - 1986 |
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| Directed by Robert Walker and written by David Rudkin.. Ran at the Bush Theatre from 20 November, 1986 and 3 January, 1987. Cast: Colin - Denis Lawson Anne - Sheila Gish Other parts played by Richard Kane and Sally Watts Reviews: "...Denis Lawson plays Colin with just the right sense of Protestant guilt (he delivers the line about being "tormented by a ravening homosexual self" with quiet concern) and Sheila Gish's maturity adds to the pathos of her determination to conceive. ..." Michael Billington, The Guardian |
| "...It is greatly to the credit of Sheila Gish, painfully convincing as the wife, and Denis Lawson as her younger husband, that they emerge from this punishingly honest play with the sort of warm humanity that commards respect. ..." Keith Nurse, Daily Telegraph "...Denis Lawson, as Colin, is burdened with unnecessary guilt because of his conviction that his homosexual past may have contributed to his present plight. But he conveys with moving sincerity the resentment and resignation of a sensitive man tolerating the indignities of medical manipulation. Sheila Gish beautifully reveals alternating sensations of radient hope and sullen despair as each experiment shifts from promise to diappointment. ..." Milton Shulman, London Evening Standard "David Rudkin's '74 play is well served in Rob Walker's production but I confess I find Rudkin's metaphor fascinating though it is, more potent in theory than on stage. Denis Lawson and Sheila Gish play a Northern Irish couple trying vainly to have a child, and much of the first act is given over to wickedly comic episodes that recall Peter Nicholls' "Joe Egg". In the second act, the equation is made clear; the couple's private grief of barrenness is, in miniature, troubled Ulster's larger grief-stricken inability to marry its divided selves. "Phoenix yourself" says Lawson dismissively, brutally aware that neither his marriage nor his country can rise up from the ashes of despair into which infertility has plunged them. Indeed, with his brow knit in stipefaction at the world, Lawson's performance is the triumph of the evening, although Richard Kane lends notable support in a variety of parts. Still, in the end, we're left waiting - like Rudkin's central couple - for this skilled playwright's thematic halves to becomes mysteriously, miraculously, whole." Matt Wolf, City Limits Thanks Alice's Requiem for everything:-) |