GYPT Show Reviews

Director Chris Durnall has always set out to present a challenge to his actors, in terms of both stagecraft and literary text, as evidenced by his previous work with Gwent Young People’s Theatre in Orton and Strindberg. He and co-producer Lisa Harris continue to do so with two short works from master playwright Harold Pinter.

Originally radio plays, the first, Monologue, was delivered in a remarkable rendition by Matthew Watkins which caught the tone of reminiscence, remonstration, rancour and regret of this quiet diatribe perfectly.

The second play was Durnall’s ambitious realisation for the stage of the ensemble piece, Family Voices. This centred on the predicament of a Candide-like innocent abroad and his encounters with the strange and sinister denizens of a dubious place of accomodation, who initiate him into the sordid reality of the wide world and the dark forces that lurk therein.

Based upon unsent epistles between the young man and his parents, interwoven with dialogue from the other characters, the play is almost symphonic in beautifully structured form, and Durnall and Harris’s format of voicing, mime and enactment was performed by their fourteen young actors with a fine clarity, essential in Pinter, and terrific precision, revealing this taut drama to be the chamber masterpiece that it is.

Perhaps the presence on stage of a silent woman in the first play was both unnecessary and distracting, especially as the woman in question was supposed to be black-skinned, a contradiction in colour between what we saw and the uttered descriptions of some of the details of attire that also cropped up occasionally in the longer play.

Nevertheless, this was another undoubted triumph for the partnership of Durnall and his company of players.

Chris Hall