Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
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Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
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It’s impossible not to warm to Caroline Williamson’s compelling portrayal of Claire. The 2006 Cambridge graduate spent months painstakingly building up her character layer by layer and it tells. She could so easily despair at the joy and then the hurt that different kinds of love have brought to this young girl but she’s intimate, warm and funny. Holding an audience’s attention alone on stage for an hour has to be challenging for an actress in her professional debut, but Williamson inhabits the entire cast of Limbo with ease, and is always vibrant and convincing. When The Yorker visited, she continued with a heroic seamlessness during a disturbance in the audience.
The play stays true to its name throughout. By the lakeside, Claire seems on the brink of suicide and the dilemma of whether she will take the plunge or not creates the tension that underlies her account. As she lives in Newry we’d expect Claire to be Catholic, and you suspect as much from plot details. So for her, suicide would leave her in another kind of limbo. She’d go to neither heaven nor hell, but purgatory.
As the play opens we’re unsure whether she’s laughing or crying. She’s a young adult but in many ways she’s just a child: “I’d never shook a man’s hand before.” And she’s caught between a romantic bond with a local lad and her relationship of necessity with the older man.
The plot is contrived but Declan Feenan’s writing skilfully maintains an audience’s anxiety with subtle reminders of where Claire is and what she might do. Water is an ever present theme: “There’s something about it. I mean, apart from being wet.” If Claire showered, or took a bath, or walked in the rain, we’re told about it. “Drink” is an oft repeated, loaded word.
And then there’s the lake itself, and it’s spellbinding, sinister attraction: “The lake is beautiful at night.”
Unfortunately Sound effects are overused. Williamson doesn’t need the howls of the wind to convince us she’s cold. It jars with the minimalist set: all black but for the ‘lake’, a shiny, metal, Charlie Dimmock style water-feature that gurgles away rather unthreateningly throughout. “The lake is beautiful at night,” Claire repeats. Hmm.
However, these are minor irritations that take nothing away from a compelling performance that won plaudits at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Limbo is well worth a look, not least to meet its chief character.
Limbo, written by Declan Sheeny and directed by Dan Sherer, is running at York Theatre Royal at 7:45pm until 03 November. Tickets are £5 for students and concessions, £10 for adults. Tel. 01904 623568 or book online at www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
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