Lily Einhorn
posted 30 May 2006

Moses Raine is 21 years old. It has become his epithet: ‘21-year-old Moses Raine’. It sounds rather disingenuous, parental. ‘Go and play with Moses, he’s 21 too, you’ll get on like a house on fire’, only the proverbial house is a theatre, and the raging inferno of a friendship is between the young playwright and his older audience. And it is relevant just as much as it isn’t. The play is a family quartet; a microcosm of family dynamics slowly told from the inside out by the youngest son, Henry, and whilst he is not always the mouthpiece for the family, he nevertheless guides the play. And as theatre audiences tend not to be made up of 21-year-old whippersnappers, now it is Raine’s youngster (do excuse me) who is showing his elders what he is made of.

And his make up is obviously quite substantial - even as the play’s setting is strangely substanceless. It is a place where waking and dreaming, reality and unreality, death and life are blurred and confused just as much as night and day, which are seemingly immaterial in a production that refuses to provide any concrete evidence of time and space. The set, sound and lights make a perfect, disjointed whole that anchors the story in limbo. Shafts of light create an open doorway, swinging ajar as a teenage boy stumbles out of his bed and into the bathroom in the middle of the night. A glass brick wall is the side of a steamy bathroom, a therapist's bare office and the sunlit deck of a gently cruising yacht. Pools of light separate a hypnotised patient from his family chattering away behind him, or open up the stage to include him on a sunlit deck. Water is everywhere in this play. It surrounds the stage in a murky pool; a sea for the yacht or an overflow for the bath. But it is Matt McKenzie’s sound design that really washes it over the stage, weaving the other elements together. The rain and wind, the echo of a dripping tap or the cacophony of splashes rising through the darkness between scenes that creates a production that seems to live and breathe around its human protagonists.

The characters themselves are a satisfyingly and somewhat sadly dysfunctional family. Imogen Stubbs is the chain-smoking earth mother; loving, wild, and with a degree of comfortable complacency that prevents her ever really connecting with her younger, troubled son - even if her heart is firmly lodged in the most correct of places. The actress’ softly spoken earnestness is beguilingly watchable and contrasts perfectly with Sam Cox’s bullish father with his pissed-on-Pimms, buck-up-sonny casually obnoxious attitude. Here is the typical English snob, chest out, claws at the ready. Moses Raine and the director, Maria Aberg, have created perfectly realised portraits of some upper class archetypes; the pompous father, the dippy mother, and the two sons – the rugby player, and the sensitive teen. They are recognisable portraits, painted with care and attention and set to a backdrop of quietly bubbling emotions, giving them a story and a dialogue that takes us by surprise, even as the characters themselves have a sense of familiarity.

The play is a journey into the murky depths of the subconscious, a place where memory and longing drift in and out of a dialogue with imagination and an uncompromising actuality. It travels between past and present, events shown to us with a combination of naturalistic, linear scenes, storytelling that is straight out to the audience, and an eerily fantastical, waking dream. It is here that some of the mystery is revealed, as Henry’s mother lies resplendent in a bath - Cleopatra-like and covered in bright white bubbles - and speaks to her son. As Henry begs his mother to stay, we realise that it is death that prevents her from doing so. He asks if he can touch her, to which she replies ‘Of course you can, this is your dream isn’t it?’ It is his dream, but he is helpless - there will always come the time to wake up. The sadness and confusion that must be a part of this realisation is sensitively portrayed by Tom Paine as Henry, his uncomfortable adolescent stance twisted into knots of anxiety, sleeves awkwardly pulled over his hands, the ends of his jumper chewed and soggy.

There is a lot of anxiety on the stage. It manifests itself in Henry as fantastical waking dreams borne out of bouts of sleepwalking. It is audible in a panicked radio broadcast of another ship, adrift at sea or in the increasingly revealing outbursts from the sozzled father, but for all of this it is a remarkably calm, self-assured production. Moses Raine, it has been said, has a bright future ahead of him. It seems that in this play he has demonstrated a pretty sparkly present, too. If he leaves the familiar archetypes behind and dives deep into the murky depths of his own imagination, he should do just fine.

Till 3 June 2006