Immersed in a black dungeon of a set with angular lighting, there is nonetheless a primal force underpinning Annabelle Comyn's earnest, blood-spattered production. It's a very modern question that's a long way from the ancients' world interest in barbarous moral dilemmas. Reliably bleak Irish writer Marina Carr has got hold of this and turned it into an absorbing two-and-a-half-hour dirge, imagining how Agamemnon and Clytemnestra must have felt about it all. Inspired by the first part of Aeschylus's ancient Greek revenge drama, The Oresteia, it tells of the warrior Agamemnon returning home from Troy where his wife Clytemnestra is waiting to kill him, for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia. Similarly hard work is Girl On An Altar in Kilburn. Hilton also has a subtler feel for the agonies of Williams's dreamy vernacular - including one line about how 'time is the longest distance between two places'. Thankfully, Paul Hilton secures the play's sentimental through-line as the older Williams who, acting as narrator, patrols the stage like a vagrant and seems to conjure up the action. Yet it's a role where we also need to feel his character's guilt. It's a lovely intimate scene, where they seem briefly made for each other as Alli's warm condescension allows her - and us - to dream for a moment.Īs Laura's brother, Glynn-Carney is angry, boozy and less forgiving in his boorish treatment of his mother. Racked by acute embarrassment, she is sweetly teased from her shyness by Victor Alli as the gentleman caller. One particular faux pas even has the fastidious Amanda sitting on her kitchen table - and that ungainly prop is, anyway, a charcoal-black cage, later relieved by a linen cloth.Īdams faces competition from Lizzie Annis's unusually vigorous Laura, who, despite being a shrinking violet, towers over her mother as if about to swallow her up.Īnnis, who has cerebral palsy, is also making her West End debut, and is the first disabled actor I've heard of playing this role in a major production.
Otherwise, the stage is besieged by a clutter of lights and furniture, beneath a huge screen showing clunky projections of symbolic images including a lovers' crescent moon. The most magical feature of Vicki Mortimer's set is the museum display cabinet for Laura's titular zoo of animal figurines. Until then, Herrin's production feels stubbornly immune to the play's melancholy poetry, which evokes such gorgeous images as 'eyes like wood smoke in autumn'.
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