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Published on 5/13/08
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Survey
The excellent first offering in this year’s Brits Off Broadway festival is David Greig’s Yellow Moon, a tart and clever verse drama that doles out tragedy with his usual thrift. In a tidy 90 minutes, without a set or large cast, Yellow Moon tucks a grand romantic tradition into a wry, modern packet.
Yellow Moon’s subtitle is The Ballad of Leila and Lee, which harkens back to the last-stand love stories of Tristan and Iseult and Bonnie and Clyde. Here the doomed sweethearts are Leila (Nalini Chetty) and Stag Lee (Andrew Scott-Ramsay)—an isolated, self-mutilating Muslim girl and the local thug—fleeing north from an almost-accidental murder. You couldn’t ask for two more depressing symptoms of British urban blight, but Greig treats them like Arthurian heroes, sending them questing through dark woods and depthless lochs. The multitasking Beth Marshall and Keith MacPherson lurk about as the failed parental figures who frustrate the teens along their way; in modern Scotland, there’s no need for a Black Knight when a deadbeat dad will do just as well.
Director Guy Hollands seats the audience around the actors, who have just a few chairs to create a world. Only MacPherson is consistently superb, and the tight quarters make serious demands of the performers. Chetty, in particular, misjudges the scale of her performance. Still, the enforced intimacy makes Moon a deliciously sad campfire story: The play may dabble in despair, but it offers enough warmth and music for many retellings.
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