No Blue Sky thinking

First appeared: Evening Star, Ipswich, October 2006

Blue Sky State, by Anna Reynolds
Mercury Theatre Company
Mercury Studio, Colchester until October 7

FIRST, the good news. This premiere production of Anna Reynolds's new play features two very fine actresses, Christine Absalom and Joanne Howarth, working their socks off. And it only lasts about 75 minutes.

I don't think it's giving away too much to tell you that the action takes place (probably) in a devastated post-nuclear-holocaust world.

In fact, I wish someone had told me that, because some of what I was puzzling over might have made more sense.

Marthe and Jan have lived alone together in their lonely cottage for 18 years. Time enough to develop their own private language.

Or, to look at it another way, to settle into some of the worst-written dialogue ever heard outside the Crossroads motel.

And then, into their lives creeps the mysterious Fox.

His arrival breaks the monotony, but poor Joel Sams, the young actor playing Fox, has an impossible task.

We don't know who he is, and neither do the two women (though Jan thinks, or pretends, she does).

Unfortunately, writer Reynolds hasn't a clue who he is either, and that means Sams is as much in the dark as his character.

Fox is simply a plot device, blessed – or cursed – with powers of expression that cannot possibly belong to the wild child he appears to be.

He seems to have emerged from a void. Yet he knows enough about other people to declare at one point: “Everybody knows how to tell a story.”

Oh no, they don't. This tedious, hackneyed play is the proof of that.