There’s a 24-hour news van parked outside Brenda’s house. The phone won’t stop ringing. She gets papped every time she leaves the house. It’s not ideal. What’s even less ideal is that her son, Matthew, has raped three women and is under house arrest.
Evan Placey’s play, set in late-Nineties Toronto and based on a true story, explores how a mother reconciles her love for her son when he has done something reprehensible. More so, when she is blamed for it by proxy. As Brenda, Tracy-Ann Oberman vamps around the stage like Margo Channing on the hunt for a Tony Award. It’s what we might describe as Big Acting, but her presence is so magnetic that she’s always watchable.
Elsewhere, despite the practical, grey set, Max Lindsay’s production has a tendency to go from one to ten in the blink of an eye. A chaotic scene just before the interval is more like watching a meltdown in the Celebrity Big Brother house. Later, Brenda tells her son he has raped her of everything but hate; Jennifer Paige’s Crush comes on; then there’s a voiceover about Bill Clinton. It’s a lot.
But most troublingly, in exploring Brenda’s dilemma, Placey makes Matthew’s violent crime almost incidental. The character is such a cipher that he feels implausibly indifferent to the seriousness of his actions. Maybe the point is that rapists don’t go on narrative journeys. Or maybe it’s just bad writing.
Until October 26; parktheatre.co.uk
