THE boredom. Oh, the boredom. The hour upon hour of it, day after day, especially when you no longer know if it is night or day.
Frank McGuinness’s kidnap drama feeds off that boredom without being boring for even a moment.
Written in 1992, shortly after the Lebanon Hostage Crisis, his psychological play is a fictional account of three Western captives thrown together in a cell at the height of those troubles.
Adam (Andy Curry) is a young American doctor who reckons his USA passport gives him the highest price on his head. Edward (Andy Love) is a cynical, middle-aged Irish journalist, and together they seek ways of staving off the tedium, exercising body and mind alike, their movements a repetitive rattle of chains, their chatter incessant.
Two become three in their hot, stinking cell when Michael (Richard Easterbrook), a widowed English tutor not long arrived at Beirut University, is dumped with them, changing the dynamic but not the circumstance.
Their captors are never seen but always present, the hostages trying not to buckle and break down for fear of weakness counting against them.
Crammed into a small space in the black-walled John Cooper Studio Theatre, with seating close up on three sides, Andy Love’s production evokes the claustrophobia, fear, defiance, camaraderie, enmity, routine and disconnection of the hostages’ shared yet still individual experience.
Love moves himself and his fellow Wildgoose Theatre cast members around the stage for each scene, giving the audience an ever-changing sightline, while reinforcing the hostages’ chained eternity.
What may surprise you, amid the stultifying uncertainty and emotional outpouring, is the humour that McGuinness mines from their situation, whether in their storytelling or their time-filling games or their inevitable clashes.
His own tone is both dryly witty and grave, and the experienced cast of York actors brings out all the twists and turns, the shafts of light and the heavy shoulder of darkness, to the accompaniment of Fergus McGlynn’s atmospheric lighting.
Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Wildgoose Theatre, 41 Monkgate Theatre, York, tonight and tomorrow at 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
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