Someone Who'll Watch Over Me

Wednesday, 18 April 2012 - Saturday, 12 May 2012
Times : 15:15 - 16:45 19:45 - 21:15

Southwark Playhouse, Shipwright Yard, Tower Bridge, SE1 2TF

How Much: £18.00 (Highest Price) , £10.00 (Lowest Price)

Somewhere underneath the tracks at London Bridge, three men sit trapped in Jessica Swale’s latest production of Frank McGuiness’s hostage drama. Set in the 1980s hostage crisis in Lebanon, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me sees an American, an Irishman and an Englishman stuck in a room together, battling it out with themselves, each other and the daily realities of their continuing imprisonment. 

It is stark and spare and heavily claustrophobic. Swale’s direction masters the shock and extremity of the script’s unexpected tonal changes and under constant psychological oppression, the three characters become disarmingly unpredictable. But this is balanced with the swathes of silence and boredom that the play somehow manages to depict while remaining resistant to their stultifying effects. Billy Carter’s charming and hopeless Edward really drives the intensity of the production, while the other two give solid performances, but ones that never quite pull away from the archetypal feel of their characters. Scenes where the three sing, write letters, make-believe and re-enact sports games are often as hilarious as they are movingly pathetic. The power of the imagination is paramount here and you’ll leave wondering what kind of inner resources you would be left with if the unimaginable happened. 

Vicky Sparrow