16  July

This thirty minute dramatic monologue gives us the tale of Freddie, a frightened nine year old, navigating the horrors of a family steeped in violence and crime in rural Devon. Actor Alex Dover maintains suspense throughout with minimal movement and a compelling stage presence in which much of the action and emotion is internal. The script by John Archer is sharply observed and wonderfully evocative. But the piece is flawed by an excess of mystery, including unresolved questions that leave the audience with a lingering confusion as to the backstory and what actually happened in those intervening fifteen years.

The narrative is relayed on a black stage against a black curtain. The actor wears a faded grey tee shirt and scuffed trainers and his realistic flat west country delivery is enhanced by an old fashioned hand mike for the voice of Freddie and his friend Alex, a significant but shadowy figure. The mike is held aside for the adults, giving those characters an eerie distance, a clever technique that helps us enter the confused world of a child who sees and experiences terrible things but never completely understands what is happening to him. We get a powerful sense of his inability to break out of his fear and report his abuse. School is a place of alienation. The police are as terrifying as the vicious father.

A soundtrack of thunder helps evoke the bleak moorland setting, the Dartmoor granite. Most of the action takes place in and around the family barn. Events are conveyed through hints and sketches, blood, chains, the stink of animals and rotting hay, unexplained disappearances. Overall, the effect is that of a troubled nightmare where cause and effect are lost to an overriding terror. The child doesn’t know what his father does for work and for most of the monologue, the audience can only guess. Questions abound. Why is the eighteen-wheel truck parked outside the farm? What horrors might be found inside?

This is a forceful and angry piece of writing. Actor and writer between them conjure a world on stage. And there are moments of wild imagination as when Freddie uses a Snickers bar to tempt the ghost out of the darkness. There is a touching depiction of childhood friendship in which two nine-year-old boys spend more time disguising their feelings than expressing them. But the complex backstory is difficult to grasp, and several threads remain unexplained and unexplored. The best of drama, even in monologue, takes us into the minds of its characters, both victims and perpetrators. This piece of theatre is heavily weighted on the side of the victim and misses the emotional punch that might be expected from the brutality of its subject matter.

The production was by Fifth Knuckle There for the Offbeat Festival.

★★★☆☆  Ros Carne  17th July 2022