Harry McDonald > Recent Status Updates

Parlour Song: 4/5 - This feels in many ways like the smallest of Butterworth's plays, even including The River, the landscape of which gives it a sense of the mythical. This is all the claustrophobia of suburbia, and doesn't it send everyone a little crazy. It's also, possibly, the most consciously theatrical.

The Winterling: 5/5 - I loved this one. Stranger and more dangerous than his more violent work that precedes it. The Pinter is worn consciously but carefully. The rhythms hit in the guts. And also, to be really clear, Butterworth is fucking funny.

The Night Heron: 3.5/5 - You really do feel with these plays that Butterworth is working his way towards something, and with the benefit of hindsight we know that's his plays of 2009 and beyond. This is a curious stop on the journey, mostly notable for Bolla Fogg - the verse-loving ex-con, a character I now totally love.

Mojo: 4/5 - A vicious, funny play that's more about the 90s than the 50s in which its set. It's so of its time it's caught in aspic.

Absent the Wrong: 4/5 - This massively ambitious, probably overlong, formally ranging proper-fuck-off-three-act-play is a headlong journey into the history of identity and family, particularly as it relates to the legacy of the so-called Mother and Baby Homes, but more widely as what those questions have to say about Irishness. A hell of a job, really.

BÁN - 5/5: I mean... a conpletely devastating version of The House of Bernada Alba. The updating and relocating has the effect of making the horror all the more visceral, rather than shrinking the tragedy as so many modernisations do. Tragedy as an absolute product of material circumstances: nothing less simple than that.