Moses Raine's first staged work charts the sinking spirits of a bereaved son.
Susannah Clapp
Sunday May 21, 2006
The Observer
Shrieks of Laughter Soho, London W1
Moses Raine wasn't born when Cheek by Jowl was founded, but he's already written a spellbinding clutch of plays: they are like no one else's. There's an unproduced five-minute drama about a three-year-old boy going to bed, and another that weaves two kinds of music - Debussy and ragtime - into its own composition. And now - the first to be put on stage, written at the age of 21, and ably directed by Maria Aberg - there's Shrieks of Laughter which, gliding between dream and daily life, creates the watery world of a young man's sinking spirits: tears, a boating catastrophe and a dead mother who bobs up from underneath the bathwater to greet her son.
Jon Bausor's fine design runs a translucent wall behind the stage and a reflection of waves in front, so that the action can seem submarine - like the dialogue which dolphins its way from inside the brain to the outside world.
You often don't know where you are - but then neither does the hero, who's played with lovely naturalness by Tom Payne. You do know that you're listening to exceptional dialogue, though one of its more subtle touches was missing on the first night. The mother advising her troubled son not to take God so seriously puts it to him that the Deity 'wouldn't want it. He's not like that'.
It never Raines but it pours. Two days after the premiere of Moses Raine's play comes that of his sister Nina. At 30, the older, but still young Raine has already proved herself an accomplished director: her production of Unprotected, the important documentary play about Liverpool prostitutes, is this year transferring to the Edinburgh Festival. Now she proves she can write, too.