Skip over navigation
The Long Road
-
- This event has finished
-
Soho Theatre, 21 Dean St, London, W1D 3NE
-
Rating:
-
-
- Last year, Tim Crouch presented his brilliant two-hander, ‘An Oak Tree’, at the Soho Theatre. In it, a father meets the man responsible for his daughter’s death, and an unrehearsed actor parallels his rudderless passage through grief. As you watch Shelagh Stephenson’s flawlessly acted but predictable new play, ‘The Long Road’, it’s worth remembering that it is possible to portray grief truthfully without a single cliché.
Here, a random, drug-fuelled stabbing has robbed a family of their youngest son. The father rails against the hippy, tea-and-biscuit sympathy of councillors. The sensitive elder sibling battles for parity with his dead brother. But the mother, hoping to make sense of what has happened, visits her son’s killer – a girl his own age. With a complete lack of revelation she turns out to be an extremely sympathetic bundle of bravado and fear with an unstable, substance-abusing background, a desperate need for companionship and self-esteem and, happily for the script, a GSOH.
Stephenson’s play, born out of prison visits with theatre company Synergy and charity The Forgiveness Project, is a patchwork of scenes and soliloquies. The language of the family’s grief is as straightforwardly and effectively physical as the single knife thrust that starts it all. But Stephenson is more committed to the trite overarching narrative than to her sudden, searing insights into the perversities and absurdities of grief, like the mother’s need to tell a prison psychologist that her dead son ‘actually had very nice feet’.
For its extremely timely subject matter and the tenderness and subtlety of its performances, ‘The Long Road’ is worth taking. But some may crave a more adventurous guide.
- Bookmark
-
-
-
-
-
- |
- Send to a friend
-
Details
-
Soho Theatre, 21 Dean St, London, W1D 3NE
- 0870 429 6883
- Category: Off-West End
- Times: Mon-Thur 8pm (pre-show talk Tue)
- Price: £10-£15
- Tube: Tottenham Court Road
Other shows on tonight
-
Hairspray, Shaftesbury Theatre
-
Brief Encounter, Cinema on the Haymarket
-
Jersey Boys, Prince Edward Theatre
-
Never So Good, National Theatre, Lyttelton
-
Into the Hoods, Novello Theatre
-
King Lear, Shakespeare's Globe
-
Pygmalion, Old Vic
-
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe
-
The Revenger's Tragedy, National Theatre, Olivier
-
The Chalk Garden, Donmar Warehouse
-
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare's Globe
-
Pygmalion, Old Vic
-
Black Watch, Barbican Theatre
-
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare's Globe
-
The Revenger's Tragedy, National Theatre, Olivier
-
Torn, Arcola Theatre
-
The Frontline, Shakespeare's Globe
-
Zorro, Garrick Theatre
-
Hangover Square, Finborough Theatre
-
All shows on tonight
