Tuesday 2nd – Saturday 6th, 7.30, Corpus Playrooms, £4-6.
Directed by Matt Kilroy.
****
Acting in the Corpus Playroom is about as difficult as trying to break dance in zero gravity. It’s such an intimate space you can’t even discreetly scratch your bum without being ostracised. Scene changes are normally clunky, black outs go on for seat-fidgetingly long and there is a real difficulty in believing anything you see on the dingy, often tacky-looking stage.
Thank the gods then for Matt Kilroy and his take on Joe Penhall’s ‘Pale Horse’, a seedy, Sarf London-set black comedy of grief, baseball bats and rum which is both emotionally engaging and creatively imaginative. Charles (Laurie Coldwell) is a bar owner trying to get over the death of his wife. In attempting to answer some of life’s hardest questions (no easy feat for a character who looks like he’s stumbled off of ‘Danny Dyer’s Real Football Factories’) he meets Lucy (Giulia Galastro), a beaten yet intriguing waitress. As Charles and Lucy realise that the world doesn’t care about them or their problems, they find solace in each other’s hopelessness and attempt to redefine themselves, one adventure at a time.
The play is most reminiscent of Graham Greene’s ‘Brighton Rock’ in its merging of unlawful characters with high-brow philosophies. Charles and Lucy often use words which seem incongruous coming out of their mockney accents, which adds to the odd trivialisation of significant events in the play. The death of Charles’ wife, the trigger of the action in the play, is very nonchalantly responded to by the characters as they find themselves in an environment where an empty pint glass is more of a concern than sin and murder.
While all of the tiny cast pull their weight, special mention must go to Laurie Coldwell and Giulia Galastro, who not only have great chemistry in moments of high passion, but also get more endearing as the play goes on. Coldwell as Charles starts the play as an emotionless wreck, and shows anger and despondency as he realises the trivialities of life. Galastro, looking run-down and pale-faced as oddball Lucy, fluctuates between self-consciousness and extreme confidence, adding spice to Charles’ already tumultuous life.
Matt Kilroy’s direction limits the restrictions that the poor performance space imposes on its actors. His black-outs come with freeze framed snippets of significant characters, meaning that there is always something interesting to look at on stage. The use of ‘cool’ indie tracks between scenes does become a repetitive and pace-killing convention and the play is perhaps not as funny as it could be, but the story is so unexpectedly thought provoking and well acted that ‘Pale Horse’ will undoubtedly be one of the theatre highlights of the week. Catch it before it ends you schlaaaag.
[...] star acclaim going to I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Cigarettes and Chocolate, Pale Horse, rogue choice Medea and The Chinese State Circus last week. Maybe we are going [...]