Theatre

Small Change
Until May 31
- Recommended
This event has finished
Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street, London, WC2H 9LX
Rating:
By Caroline McGinn

Posted: Mon Apr 21
Peter Gill’s 1976 play is set in the ’50s Wales of his own boyhood. It’s about two Welsh lads, Gerard and Vincent, neighbours who are always knocking about up to no good, escaping the terraced surveillance and despair of their overpowering mothers, Mrs Driscoll and Mrs Harte. And it’s a gem: an enigmatic, tender, time-dodging piece, which flits around the years and places of their fugitive boyhoods and leaves you with a glancing picture of unspoken love and sheer bloody awfulness.

Gill also directs this new production, on Anthony Ward’s blank, black-red, slightly raked stage. The young men and their mothers sit initially in off-set chairs at the back of the stage. They speak in ones, then in twos, clearly setting out the formal 4-by-4 of the relationships that the play explores. The minimal set, and the unobtrusive paces that Gill puts his actors through, push the performances and the words fully into the foreground. And the script, with its red skies and slag heaps and the driving lilt of its local dialogue, is grimly, poetically satisfying.

At least two of the performances are excellent: Sue Johnston as Gerard’s stringy, self-preserved mother, has a stillness when sitting that conveys her life-saving ability to rest. And Luke Evans’s Vincent (son of Mrs Driscoll, who cannot rest from the babies and drudgery that eventually take her life) is powerfully straightforward. Both boys (Evans and Matt Ryan’s Gerard) age and grow younger with instant conviction: their laddish bickering is a comic treble to the broken depth of their final encounter, which also reveals the erotic undercurrent of their relationship. I sometimes found more to admire than to experience here, and the boys’ and their mothers’ amity and loss were not as moving as they might have been. Nevertheless, ‘Small Change’ deserves small criticism.