A Cold Coming

[shewhomust]

Local company KG Productions relaunched themselves as a theatrical company with a new play commissioned from Chaz Brenchley; they asked him for a short play, not a comedy, and he responded with a piece on one of his recurring themes, one with which he has already flirted in short stories, an unpublished novella and an internet-specific short story. I hope he will eventually write the novel which is clearly fermenting on this subject, but in the meantime A Cold Coming will do nicely.

Quin is dying - of AIDS, as it happens, and strictly the play is a period piece, a reminder of a time when AIDS was suddenly and catastrophically present, and before the appearance of the drugs with which our part of the world now manages to live with AIDS. This is central, that the play is a portrait of a particular man in a particular situation, but it isn't all that important: what matters is that Quin is dying and rather than die in hospital he has come home, where he is tended by a group of volunteers, of friends, of ex-students and an ex-lover. And then Michael comes home.

It's an ensemble piece: Michael (played by Sean Kenney) has the largest part, confronting each of the other characters in turn, asserting his right, despite his long absence, to be accepted as Quin's lover, coping with the situation as best he could, entitled to have his opinion respected: browbeating the younger Amanda (Jill Dellow) and Zoot (Wayne Miller), sparring with his rival, Stuart (Bill E. Meeks) and old friend Gillian (Anne Graydon), cajoling Debs and James (Viktoria Kay and Iain Cunningham, less convincing as the married couple, perhaps because their characters were less developed in the text) - but constantly upstaged by the silent and inert Quin, a part which Chaz naturally reserved for himself (and played admirably).

The play is theatrical rather than realistic: people say what the audience needs to be told, they make the points we need to consider, rather than what real people might actually say. And they say it beautifully, wittily, movingly; Quin has influenced all who knew him, they have all been remade in his likeness, and it is presumably his voice that echoes through everything they say. It's rather like watching Shaw shoe-horned into the classical unities: a single room, a single night, a single theme and no violent action, just a brief and intense experience, like the flaring of a candle flame.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Just to say, I did not neither reserve Quin to myself!! Casting an actor who would be content simply to lie on stage for an hour and a half without a word, without a move - and for profit-share, rather than a fee - proved to be almost an insuperable problem, and the director asked me to do it almost as a last resort. Which I did it, but it was very weird...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Actors are strange people: yes, I see the limitations of the part, but he really is the focus of the play. And yes, it was very weird...