Clik here to view.
Old Red Lion, London
The wealthy Snelgraves, shut up in their house in a plague-ravaged London in 1665, have only hours left of a 28-day quarantine when their home is invaded by a sailor, Bunce, and a 12-year-old girl who claims to be the only surviving child of neighbours. With the arrival of the newcomers, the Snelgraves' quarantine, enforced by the corrupt Kabe, who stalks the streets like death itself, must begin all over again.
Naomi Wallace's play, premiered at the Bush in 1995, benefits from being played in the Old Red Lion's confined space as it charts a society turned not just upside down but also inside out by a fear of a disease that affects rich and poor, powerful and powerless. Stripped bare in death, everyone looks the same in the plague pit. It is the bodies beneath the clothes and the lives beneath bodies themselves that are explored by Wallace in a play where issues of class and politics are probed with a fierce, searing tenderness. Trapped together in a single room, the unlikely quartet are pioneers in a new world where transgression can bring liberation. A finger is placed in an open wound, gin is spat into another's open mouth, a woman's scarred, burned body, untouched for 35 years, responds to a hand that has travelled the world journeying across her flesh. Even death can be delivered with angel's breath.
It's rich and dense, but never less than compelling in a revival that boasts some fine performances, particularly from Kate Abrahams, whose grave Mrs Snelgrave seethes with quiet longing. I'm not convinced that the dumb-show-style installation at the beginning really adds much to the proceedings, but this is a tough and transcendent piece of proper grown-up theatre on the Fringe.
