Post-adolescent angst deepens into a genuinely arresting portrait of separation and loss in Shrieks of Laughter, the debut play from Moses Raine, who is still in his early 20s. (Raine is the son of the Oxford poet and critic Craig Raine.) As timing—and a quintessentially English kind of convergence would have it—this offering from Raine fils is opening within days of a new play at the Old Red Lion, Islington, penned by Moses' older sister, Nina. But the junior Raine need make no apology for trading on the family name or for a penchant for words that clearly goes with the gene pool: running a scant 50 minutes, the play may be slight but it does stick with you, especially in director Maria Aberg’s smart, empathic staging.
The least engaging scene is the opener, a patient/therapist encounter punctuated by the sounds of rain. (Liquid of varying kinds, including urine, is a feature of the evening.) Urged on by therapist Peter (Clarence Smith), the dark-featured, faintly androgynous Henry (Tom Payne) is bidden into a trance that itself comes accompanied by some distinctly poetic exhortations: “into the black abyss, do not fight it, pulling you, a place that is without a time, mouth open, tumbled into the void… into a century of sleep.” The risk, of course, is of a narcotizing effect that has a comparably soporific result on the audience, which is where Aberg’s directorial legerdemain comes in. Before you know it, the area to the front of Jon Bausor’s reflecting set begins to shimmer, and we find ourselves in a liquefied landscape abstracted from reality, the mirrored ceiling enclosing the action like some psychic pane of glass that the fraught Henry will eventually need to smash.
Before long, Henry’s family emerges on the scene: his yoga-loving, bohemian mother, who is aptly named India and is played by Imogen Stubbs with a grace and lack of self-consciousness I’ve never encountered in her before. Perfectly capturing a mumsy beneficence that is distinctively British, Stubbs’ India provides an effortless contrast to Raymond (Sam Cox), Henry’s apparently terminally dyspeptic dad. Raymond, it would seem, is after Henry to join the army, which is about the last milieu where our Sensitive Young Hero would most likely shine. (Raymond’s argument is that the military offers “the stability of an institution.”) Completing the quartet is Oliver Coleman in notably bemused form as Henry’s older brother, Thomas; those wanting more of Coleman can catch him on BBC in the new TV adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s award-winning novel, The Line of Beauty.
Next, we’re on the deck of a large motorboat, with the family in full throttle—and “Hen,” as India has nicknamed her adoring child, no longer bothering to hide his pain. While the mustachioed, Eton-educated Raymond hits the Pimms, a distress call from the coastguard goes unremarked above the collective rancour—dad ragging his own son for not having a girlfriend (“it would be nice to see you with a bit of crumpet on your arm”) and India proffering crisps like a nautical peace offering. A beat elapses, and India reappears, this time soaking in a tub and taking up a tête-à-tête with her son. Stubbs plays the encounter cleanly and with real truth, her presence a wake-up call to a wounded child whose as yet unformed life, we gather, has been marked by undue grief.
Aberg, the director, has won acclaim for her work at the Southwark Playhouse and elsewhere, and her sensitivity here gives signs of her apprenticeship with directors like Tom Cairns, on Aristocrats, and Dominic Cooke, whom Aberg assisted on his current RSC The Crucible. Nigel Edwards’ lighting occasionally electrifying the space like some sort of visual alarum all its own, the production inhabits a shadowy realm where dream merges into nightmare, even if the final posting from the coast guard (“help is on the way”) implies that all may not go ill. I’m not sure the title, Shrieks of Laughter, makes much sense, either literal or metaphoric, within the realm of the play, but it’s blessed by a production even more confidant than the writing, Aberg's expert eye inducing the quiet pleasures of a bold, bright career that is still to come.
Shrieks of Laughter
By Moses Raine
Directed by Maria Aberg
Soho Theatre
Theatre.com - Matt Wolf
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