Review The Busy World Is Hushed

Peter Barker discovers a place for belief and its challenges in an  intriguing new play from across the Atlantic. 

The Busy World Is Hushed
by Keith Bunin

Father, Son And Holy Ghostwriter
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

The Busy World is Hushed is a discursive three hander looking at parenthood and sexuality, as well as the significance of holy scripture in the 21st century.

Playwright Keith Bunin sets the play in the New York household of a single mother.

In this case, Hannah's part of a modern Manhattan Episcopalian priesthood and an academic about to embark on a book exploring the possibility and implications of a missing New Testament gospel.

She's hiring Brandt as an assistant, a kind of holy ghostwriter,  but she's also preoccupied with her restless 20-something son, Thomas.

Both mother and son are haunted by the past, the sudden death of her husband when she was pregant with Thomas.

Her son has just returned from one of his habitual long absences in the New England wilderness, immediately hitting it off with Brandt.

Bunin's writing is intelligent and humane, intertwining theological debate with the domestic circumstances and the emotional undercurrents swirling around and motivating the characters. From this simple situation Bunin spins off a plethora of ideas.

Marc Turcich's set design, a study with its chaotically strewn bibles and Anglican works interpreting the holy texts, will be familiar to anyone who has entered a priest's study.

Director Paul Higgins keeps up the momentum throughout the play's 90 minutes by often drawing the characters on the stage into triangles of conflict. 

Kazia Pelka is the believer Hannah who nevertheless maintains a healthy scepticism about the man-made nature of the bible as text, but still cannot fathom her husband's sudden death years before.

Mathew James's Thomas conveys the febrile nature of a young man, also seeking answers about his father, who enters into a relationship with his mother's new employee. 

Meanwhile Mateo Oxley, as Brandt, is the writer who struggles to have any belief, especially with the impact of his father's serious illness. Oxley makes a convincing East Coast patrician, an urbane intellectual, both a lover and grieving son.

The two men's love affair is handled as a naturally occuring circumstance.  However, sometimes a self-conscious effort to introduce conflict feels contrived and the attitudes and actions of the characters are skewed to suit the needs of the plot.

It's not perfect but it's an amber/green light for an absorbing drama in a well-performed production. 

Review Twilight Song

Twilight Song
by Kevin Elyot

Ah! Sweet Mystery Of Life
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Twilight Song, written by the late Kevin Elyot in 2014 just before his death, is an odd little playwriting confection about some odd fellows and a woman. 

Analyse it closely and it turns out to be a tawdry tale of impregnation, loans, property, possible professional fraud, furtive sexual encounters, time slippages and blackmail, all wrapped  in colourful tissue paper and tied with a great big ribbon bow.

We can't begin to add up all the self-consciously theatrical and cinematic styles it seems to go through - there's a touch of Rattigan, definitely some Noel Coward and Alfred Hitchcock, even a snippet of Christopher Isherwood, Charles Dickens and DH Lawrence (or is it EM Foster ...?) and, hey, is that Monty Python parody?

This is the première of Elyot's last play and, despite some sluggish moments, director Anthony Banks gives us a stylish production set on James Cotterill's wooden round stage living room with a settee, curved French windows, mahogany gramophone and a silver drinks' trolley to create a Scotch haze. 

It's a slickly, but rather mechanically, put together play and it rather feels as if the playwright put together the themes going around  rather than a deeply-felt piece. 

Maybe it was intended to go a bit deeper into the gay influence on literature, film and television and what this meant before and after 1967 legislation, yet this never really develops, even in metaphor.  

Still, after a slow and rather stilted beginning, the story does take hold. Barry (Paul Higgins) is a middle-aged gay retired pharmacist who lives with his mother in a North London Victorian villa. While she takes her regular weekly trip to Kent, he invites an estate agent (Adam Garcia) to give a valuation and other services. 

Centred on the house, this modern day encounter slips back to the 1960s and delicate girlish bride Isabella (Bryony Hannah) welcoming two old codgers into her marital home. 

Charles (Hugh Ross), an elderly doctor and seemingly someone's uncle. Harry (Philip Bretherton), a dodgy married solicitor, like Charles, seems well lodged in his current comfortable middle-class existence even if it seems the two men have a past. 

Slipping back and forth in time, by the end we can piece together the story and obtain a sense of an ending but, while it may have been meant as a satire or parody, it comes across as a rather lacklustre playwriting effort.

References to Conservative but pro Welfare State prime minister MacMillan and 1960s emigration to Australia are flagged up as well as a wife's thwarted career.

However, in the end it feels as if we've been lured to spy through the keyhole at a rather insubstantial and too self-satisfied mystery story and it's an amber light.