BRIDGET Foreman’s Beyond Measure has grown out of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, and likewise Clara Brennan’s Rain carries on where Declan Feenan’s Lough leaves off.

And so a theme of What Happens Next? connects these otherwise discrete productions that can be seen the same on the night as part of York Theatre Royal’s commitment to new work, new companies and new artists.

Actress Rina Mahoney’s company Back & Forth makes its debut with Beyond Measure, a premiere that opens at York before taking to the touring road.

A set path awaits Rina Mahoney this autumn, but not so the character she plays in York writer Bridget Foreman’s one-woman show. Like Tony Blair, in the halcyon days of New Labour, Mahoney’s Isabella could choose a third way, in doing so rejecting the abstinent life of a nun or high-society duties if she were to accede to the Duke’s desire to make her his Duchess.

Written in blank verse yet modern language by Foreman to achieve a seamless baton hand-over from Shakespeare’s play, Beyond Measure is a questing, questioning, suffragette piece, as heavy as lead on text, but leavened by multi-media resources, Craig Vear’s music and Ruth Tyson-Jones’s unusual, contorted choreography.

A large screen looms over Mahoney’s Isabella, sometimes showing her own face, sometimes panning in on the faces of her would-be suitors, adding to her sense of feeling trapped amid the designer Matt Edwards’ towering edifice of a nunnery.

Watching Isabella’s vexations feels like swimming against the tide for much of the journey of Juliet Forster’s worthy, somewhat fraught production. Not until the finale does Mahoney break free of the repetitive rhythms that she gives Foreman’s speech patterns.

Lough/Rain builds on the promise of Real Circumstance director Dan Sherer’s debut at the Theatre Royal, Limbo. Schooled in the Mike Leigh method of devised performance, Sherer has his cast of Kate Donmall and Jot Davies know everything about their characters’ past lives before letting them loose on the script, so that their performance is wholly natural and honest.

Declan Feenan’s short Irish play Lough is a day-in-the-life snapshot of an everyday Newry morning for Donmall’s Caoimhe, up early preparing sandwiches for work after a late night out with the girls. Davies’s Michael is full of questions, and restless concern at a man’s movements on the lough, failing to spot the burning toast that is but one note of foreboding.

Silence and cut-up sounds are unsettling too, but not as much as Donmall’s shocked screams that indicate Lough’s transition into Rain, wherein the couple are coming to terms with unspoken changed circumstances that have left Michael on a hospital drip.

Both performers were nominated for The Stage awards at the Edinburgh Fringe, and deservedly so: acting this intimate, this committed, is rare, raw, riveting.


Beyond Measure, Back & Forth/York Theatre Royal, 7.45pm; Lough/Rain, Real Circumstance/York Theatre Royal, 9.30pm, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until October 4. Box office: 01904 62356.