Review: 1.17AM, OR UNTIL THE WORDS RUN OUT, Finborough Theatre
Photo credit: Giulia Ferrando
Shortlisted for Theatre503’s International Playwriting Award, 1.17am, or until the words run out now makes its world premiere at another compact new writing venue across the Thames. Zoe Hunter Gordon’s play places two former friends in the room of a dead man, forcing them to reconnect and confront some uncomfortable truths as they sift through his possessions. Over the course of 75 minutes, we pull from these fragments of a life a story about trust, loyalty and friendship.
Zoe Hunter Gordon’s chamber piece is well-situated in the snug space of the Finborough Theatre where, under Sarah Stacey’s tight direction, the cast of two prowl the stage like nervous caged animals.
Eileen Duffy delicately walks a tightrope as Roni, sensitive to her friend’s grief while nursing her own. Particularly towards the climax of the show, Duffy embodies Roni’s roiling internal conflict with a sense of almost physical pain. Likewise, Catherine Ashdown brings astonishing physicality to her performance as Katie. Ashdown’s raw vulnerability is impossible to watch without catching her aching sadness.
This is a meaty script, packing in just about every devastating twist and knotty issue possible – from family bereavement to class difference and housing precarity, to sexual assault to depression. Zoe Hunter Gordon manages to juggle these themes deftly and somehow weave them into her naturalistic script without sensationalising.
Mim Houghton’s set design is simple and effective, paying attention to the most minute details to create richly textured realism, a stage that is poignant in its mundanity. Sarah Spencer’s sound design is also incredibly effective, capturing the thrumming distant noise of an offstage party that adds a heartbeat to the production.
Naturally, as Roni and Katie are two friends who share years of history and a familiar conversational shorthand, the audience is forced to do quite a lot of piecing together of the puzzle of the onstage relationships. Struggling under the weight of honesty, a lot of lines in the show trail off and are left unfinished, and while the unsaid is often as powerful (if not more so) than the spoken word in theatre, this faltering rhythm did leave this reviewer, at times, silently praying for someone to finish a sentence.
The cycle of emotions in this show, of comfortable, easy peace and hackles-raised confrontation, is instantly recognisable to anyone who has shared in a long-term female friendship. But sometimes the thread of arguments is a little muddied, the motivations confusing and not quite ringing true. The self-censoring of the characters gives the show a clipped and jolting quality, and a lot of lines of dialogue are wasted not saying very much at all.
But all in all, 1.17am, or until the words run out is an intensely passionate piece – fraught, tender and dangerously relatable.
*** Three stars
Reviwed by: Livvy Perrett
