Written by Caryl Churchill
Red Stitch Theatre
2 – 30 June, 2019
Director: Jenny Kemp
Featuring: Julie Forsyth, Marta Kaczmarek, Caroline Lee & Margaret Mills
Set & Costume Design: Dann Barber
Lighting Design: Rachel Burke
Sound Design: Elizabeth Drake
Stage Manager: Jackie Mates
Three old friends and a neighbour. A summer of afternoons in the backyard. Tea and catastrophe.
“I’m walking down the street and there’s a door in the fence open and inside there are three women I’ve seen before… so I go in.”
In a sun-drenched suburban backyard, three older women: Vi, Sally and Lena, are joined by Mrs Jarrett, a passing neighbour, as they meet and reflect on their lives. Together they discuss everything from the everyday to the absurd, the sublime and the ridiculous, constructing, over the course of a number of summer afternoons, what appears to be the ordinary labyrinth of a middle-class female life. However, what unravels is a profound and confronting expression of our deepest human fears, as the quiet but surprising newcomer, Mrs Jarrett, reveals that she is privy to something far more catastrophic than we could have imagined.
“The play’s combination of theatrical technique and untrammelled imagination, and of the personal and the universal, make you understand why Ms. Churchill is regarded by many (rightly, I think) as the most dazzlingly inventive living dramatist in the English language.”
The New York Times
“Caryl Churchill follows Beckett and Pinter into the field of fertile minimalism…This is Churchill at her best, observing with wry compassion how people actually talk.”
The Guardian (UK)
