For Once

In a place where everyone knows your name you can't forget who you are.

Life, love and loss in a picture postcard town are laid bare in this heartbreaking but darkly comic new play. Read more …

Through a series of interweaving accounts For Once cuts to the heart of a family, and a community, turned upside down by unimaginable tragedy.

For Once is Tim Price's debut play. His play Salt, Root and Roe (Donmar Trafalgar Season) has just been nomintated for an Oliver Award. Elsewhere, The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning opens as part of National Theatre Wales' current season. For Once premiered in 2011 at Hampstead Theatre and is directed by the new Traverse Artistic Director, Orla O'Loughlin.

The critical consensus

Though it has the capacity to wound its audience on quite a deep emotional level, it’s just hard to swallow as progressive and superior theatre.

(*) (*) Andrew Latimer, TV Bomb, 05/04/2012

It’s a mark of Price’s astonishing poetic sharpness and skill that at the end of his short hour of theatre, we fully understand just how many lies each family member must tell, to sustain their life together; and just why, after all, it might be worth it.

(*) Joyce McMillan, 05/04/2012

For Once is a sad, funny and meticulously observed debut by [playwright Tim] Price.

(*) Neil Cooper, The Herald, 06/04/2012

Orla O’Loughlin, in the first outing of her work as she takes on the mantle of Traverse artistic director, coaxes a trio of fine, nuanced performances.

(*) Allan Radcliffe, The List, 07/04/2012

There is some neat, gentle humour in Price's writing, which is given particularly lovely expression by Jonathan Smith (whose Sid often seems like a younger incarnation of comedian David Mitchell). Ultimately, however, this is a modest production of a modest play; and hardly the most exciting start to O'Loughlin's Traverse career.

Mark Brown, Sunday Herald, 08/04/2012