- OTHER MEDIA
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- Ashes to Ashes and Afterplay
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- Harold Pinter's plays are unmistakably his. His penchant for pauses
and awkward silences has even given rise to an adjective: Pinteresque.
In his one-act Ashes to Ashes, an uncomfortable scene in a drawing room
unfolds between detached intellectual Devlin (Aaron Murphy) and his brittle,
coy wife Rebecca (Mary Samson). She teeters on the edge of revealing a
possibly horrific past while he persists in missing the point, quizzing
her relentlessly on mundane details such as the color of her former lover's
eyes. The somewhat predictable staging of this small gem of misdirection
does not detract overmuch from the performance rendered by the actors —
Samson in particular inhabits her obfuscatory character without a trace
of hesitation. The second one-act, Brian Friel's Afterplay, places two
unrelated Chekhovian characters in a restaurant together (Sonya Alexandrovna
from Uncle Vanya [1899], and Andrey Prozorov from Three Sisters [1901]),
where they are able to give their sides to their respective stories. It's
easier to connect with these more sympathetic characters than in Ashes,
though there is a moment that ties the two plays together when Andrey attempts
to question Sonya about Michail, her erstwhile lover. Overall, if this
production has a fatal flaw, it's that it is only being mounted for a two-week
run. (Gluckstern)
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