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Everyone who’s lived long enough will have experienced the slow, creeping, Victor Meldrew-ish feeling that things are going to the dogs, that the rot is setting in. But what happens when you cut through the trite cliches and actually do something about it?
James Fritz’s Bruntwood Prize-winning new play is a harrowing exploration of the void between feeling something, and taking action. Kat (Esther Smith) takes a stand that swaps her dull, pleasant life for a statement of searing power. Fritz leaves the specifics of her situation refreshingly ambiguous, crafting a hugely original, intricate work that’s simultaneously set both nowhere and absolutely right now.
It’s split into two sharp acts. In the first, we’re inside Kat’s head. She’s goaded on by her braver, crueller self (Lois Chimimba) into leaving her sleeping husband and young daughter and embarking on a journey to martyrdom. As Kat, Smith is alternately resolute and endearingly impulsive, driven on by an inner light that flickers, faintly, when she gets a phonecall from her mum, or her colleague offers her a biscuit. Sometimes it feels that her world is just too mundane, too full of barbecues and conservatories, to be the stuff of legend.
In the second act, Kat's big protest fails, and she's dragged back into her old world of gentle hypocrisy. The stage fills with her family and colleagues, each navigating their own path through a world that, it’s suggested, is turning into a nastier and nastier place.
Idealism and pragmatism are often seen as polar opposites, one fading into the other with age like morning into night. Fritz’s text destabilises this idea, exploring the delicate interplay of self-interest, loyalty and care that shapes our ability to act on what seem like abstract political ideas. Directed by Jude Christian, it’s fast-paced and almost physically painful to watch. As it reels on, there’s a Sarah Kane-esque sense of the cleansing power of violence. And it ends like a raised fist, swaying up above a crowd, blunt but undeniably powerful.