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TO
49 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 14, 2020
1F, 1M who play multiple roles
Before I read this play I’d been watching the final episode – I thought I’d chosen the first - of ‘Inspector Morse’ on TV in which Morse dies, and was feeling keenly a melancholy sense of my own mortality.
With my sensitivities thus exposed, I read ‘To’ and found the ending fully as moving as Cartwright must have hoped a reader/audience would.
A Landlord and Landlady of a pub spend an evening dispensing drinks and comfort and providing a place to seek out company to a sundry group of punters – a mismatched couple, the randy, the isolated, the abusive husband and abused wife, the husband and wife comfortable in their own obesity, a young lad who’s lost his father.
And all the time they chunter and banter at and with each other. We know that something is eating at each of them, and, for some reason, on this night in particular. It’s the revelation in the final scene of what it is that should really transfix an audience’s collective heart. Cartwright’s construction of the play is such that he gradually exposes our sensitivities, allowing us moments of respite, but never long enough to recover any emotional composure, so that the Landlord’s and Landlady’s pain is delivered with full effect.
A challenge for two actors, and energetic, intense and cathartic for the audience.
Before I read this play I’d been watching the final episode – I thought I’d chosen the first - of ‘Inspector Morse’ on TV in which Morse dies, and was feeling keenly a melancholy sense of my own mortality.
With my sensitivities thus exposed, I read ‘To’ and found the ending fully as moving as Cartwright must have hoped a reader/audience would.
A Landlord and Landlady of a pub spend an evening dispensing drinks and comfort and providing a place to seek out company to a sundry group of punters – a mismatched couple, the randy, the isolated, the abusive husband and abused wife, the husband and wife comfortable in their own obesity, a young lad who’s lost his father.
And all the time they chunter and banter at and with each other. We know that something is eating at each of them, and, for some reason, on this night in particular. It’s the revelation in the final scene of what it is that should really transfix an audience’s collective heart. Cartwright’s construction of the play is such that he gradually exposes our sensitivities, allowing us moments of respite, but never long enough to recover any emotional composure, so that the Landlord’s and Landlady’s pain is delivered with full effect.
A challenge for two actors, and energetic, intense and cathartic for the audience.
Displaying 1 of 1 review