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Bedbound
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Having won an award at the Edinburgh fringe and played across Europe and the US, Endo Walsh's electro-shock play is likely to have an impact in Oxford. Through a series of monologues and violent exchanges a manic father and his incapacitated daughter are confined to a bed and delve into their desperate shared past. Only an hour long, this is a ferocious, nasty spectacle but it leaves plenty of unanswered questions and will linger in the mind more than much popcorn entertainment. The father relives his rise from the basement of the furniture trade to the top and down again. Driven by a paranoid bloodlust that leads him to kill his way to the head of the Cork-based firm, his story tells us also how the daughter came to be - how he acquired a wife to produce an '& Son' for his business, but ended up with a daughter instead. We also learn how the daughter contracted polio at a young age and lost the use of her legs. We are never told how the mother died. Having grown up in this bed, the daughter's sense of reality is lacking and she can't help talking and babbling as an escape from her prison. But where she lives in fear of silence, the father has had enough of voices and wants a peace that will allow him to sleep away the guilt and shame of his murderous furniture days. Though each tells their side of the story in vivid, sometimes comic outbursts, it is in the dialogue between the two that the real intrigue lies and proves the source of the unexpectedly tender ending. Much depends on the two actors in such an intense drama. Antonio Reed-Felstead is convincing as the daughter and does well to play the supporting cast in the father's furniture stories by the use of masks and gruntish voices. While Daniel Naddafy takes full advantage of Endo Walsh's frenzied dialogue, he seems a little too young and fresh-faced to be a brutal father and businessman. Another problem lies with the original script itself. This frenzy is sustained over the whole hour, and it is impossible to take in the words when the spectacle is such a whirl. By the fourth or fifth rant, any force was inevitably ebbing. Silence would have made a strong third voice. Extending the play and giving the words a chance to breathe could have given each line more impact. The set is very interesting, with the walls of the room swinging in around the bed to reduce the space. The daughter has spoken of the walls closing in around her mentally, and of hearing banging through the night, and the father too has complained of the thump-thump in his head adding to his torment. It turns out the father, in a literal manifestation of his own weird psycho-state, had been putting up plaster boards and gradually moving the walls in upon the daughter. The resolution is deliberately problematic, with both father and daughter finding peace in reading a book together. Is this something peculiarly Irish going on here, with the two characters, one living only in words, the other in memory, finally able to deal with grim reality by turning to fiction? We leave them still bedbound, and can only piece together the moments of this engrossing but tricky play. Ben O'Loughlin, 27.03.03 |
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