Thought on my character: wife/ wife ego.
Theatre review: Stoning Mary at Royal Court Theatre Downstairs. Debbie Tucker Green, who won the Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer last year, has written a disturbing new play that has undertones of Harold Pinter.
Stoning Mary may last for no more than an hour but it addresses serious issues and packs a mighty punch. Ultz is fast becoming the Designer in Residence at the Royal Court and once again, he has ripped the Theatre apart, laying a stark stone floor painted pale blue over the stalls seats. In the massive space stretching to the back wall of the Theatre, three feuding couples battle out their grievances with no immediate connection apparent.
It is only right at the end that the missing link is provided. The first battle takes place between Peter Sullivan and Emily Joyce, playing a thirtysomething couple suffering from Aids. Cut into this relationship is that of an older couple played by Alan Williams and Ruth Sheen who bicker about who loves their lost son, a machete-wielding child soldier, the most. Griffin Theatre : Stoning Mary. There are an estimated 200,000 child soldiers fighting in wars in Africa right now.
It is predicted that the number of people living with HIV in South Africa will exceed 6 million by 2015, by which time around 5.4 million South Africans will have died of AIDS. In January 2008 Amnesty International issued a plea for international pressure to stop the scheduled executions of 11 people by stoning in Iran. What if this was all happening here and not on the other side of the world? How would you live with your son if he was a child soldier? If you and your partner were both HIV+ and you only had enough money for one prescription course how would you decide who gets it? From debbie tucker green comes a play prepared to ask dangerous questions of the audience. Director Lee Lewis Producers Stella Carmody, Brett Boardman Costume dsign Alice Babidge Sound design Stephan Gregory Lighting design Luiz Pampolha With Shaun Goss, Amanda Maple-Brown, Sam North, Sophie Ross and Yael Stone.
M/C Reviews - Theatre: Stoning Mary. Reviewed by Logan GreenStoning Mary is a play that sets out to educate white westerners whove missed the point about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and to hit home the urgency of it to the audience.
In the directors note, Lee Lewis proclaims debbie tucker green one of the most exciting and important contemporary playwrights on the planetHer text moves between the imaginative landscape of incredible beauty and the gut wrenching ordinariness of everyday speech...Her writing and politics are urban, international and unflinching. Apparently, stories from newspaper clippings in Africa have been developed into a story capable of being set in whichever city its performed so that we get it. In fact, there was nothing that identified the plays performance as Sydney (a stipulation of Ms tucker greens that the play be set in the same city it is being performed). Stoning Mary, Royal Court, London. Words alone do not make drama: what one craves is a marriage between action and language.
And, although Debbie Tucker Green's third play is boldly directed by Marianne Elliott on a peninsular platform that occupies the Royal Court stalls, it still feels more like an acted poem than a fleshed-out play. Tucker Green interweaves three apparently discrete stories. One involves an Aids-afflicted husband and wife who can only afford one life-saving prescription between them. A second story has middle-aged parents endlessly wrangling over their teenage soldier son. The third segment deals with a woman's visit to her imprisoned sister awaiting death by stoning. You can see what Tucker Green is trying to do: shock us into new awareness by transposing three putative third world stories into a white culture. I don't deny our capacity for violence, but I would have been more shocked if the play had shown us how death by stoning, for instance, sprang from cultural and religious practices.