Lorna Irvine reviews 'a vibrant, bittersweet' lunchtime play.
Deb Jones' surreal play for PPP adds a fourth 'P' (literally, at one point) - a vibrant, bittersweet liquid lunch with two most endearing alcoholics--soused spouses Caitlin MacNamara and Dylan Thomas.
A skittish, girlish yet vulnerable Caitlin, movingly portrayed by the wonderful Gaylie Runciman, gives lusty voice to her relationship with the ever unreliable Welsh poet--and all of his attendant demons. 'Neat whisky--tremendous; neat life-dull,’ she quips, whilst lamenting his lack of care for their 'three little pickles' (young children). There are also many aborted babies when he takes mistresses.
She addresses a glass of whisky like an errant lover, dabbing it on her wrist like a French perfume, before chastising it for taking her true love, and in the erratic moments when Dylan (Stephen Clyde, equally raucous and compelling) joins her to drink, curse and dance, there is a palpable, bawdy chemistry and talk of her knickerless cartwheels.
Yet, whisky sours: it's one more for the road to oblivion, and the once jolly drinking songs are now just white noise. Dylan has left Caitlin and is now lying in a coma, having imbibed too much in America. He will not wake up--and Caitlin is driven mad.
Highly inventive, sexually-charged and very beautiful, Jones' script is wise, scabrous and heartfelt, ruminating on how our desires can be the undoing of us, with typically impish direction by Alan McKendrick. Co-dependency never looked so fun--or so harrowing.
www.playpiepint.com
Gaylie Runciman's blog: http://advisorpod4.blogspot.co.uk
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