Kidnapped as a teenage girl, Ma has been locked inside a purpose built room in her captor’s garden for seven years. Her five year old son, Jack, has no concept of the world outside and happily exists inside Room with the help of Ma’s games and his vivid imagination where objects like Rug, Lamp and TV are his only friends. But for Ma the time has come to escape and face their biggest challenge to date: the world outside Room. Read more …
The nightmarish story may be a fiction but its roots are in reality, making this a difficult work to approach.
A moving adaptation of the award-winning novel, with added songs, explores the mental toll on an abducted woman and her child.
Both prurience and sentimentality are admirably kept at bay.
It's not that Donoghue's story doesn't resonate as such, but it needs playing straight to have any power.
The end result is a heart-rending depiction of a mother and child's survival of the unthinkable through the power of a love that finally allows Jack and Ma to come home.
The story of Room is in some ways a harrowing one, that brings many in the audience to tears. Yet it is also a tremendously beautiful, vivid and uplifting show about the power of a mother’s love.
Interview: Director Cora Bissett on bringing hit novel Room to the stage.
Emma Donoghue: 'Room is about the power of imagination, it belongs on stage'.
Dundee Rep Theatre, Dundee from Tuesday June 13, 2017, until Saturday June 17, 2017. More info: www.dundeereptheatre.co.uk