As a party rages on outside, two friends hash it out, in this emotional tour de force.
A grieving girl. A claustrophobic room filled with her dead brother’s clothes. And an ex-best friend. Zoe Hunter-Gordon’s writing expertly weaves together these powerful ingredients of tension, creating a hair-raising 70 minutes of stunning realism that offers a profound meditation on what it feels like to lose people in our life, and the pain of discovering a different side to the ones you love.
Katie, played with profound emotional depth by Catherine Ashdown, has shut herself in her dead brother’s room in his flat share. A room she feels belongs to a side of her brother she never truly got to know.
The distance Katie feels from him is worsened when her childhood and recently estranged best friend Roni, played with a vibrant stage presence and gripping command of the audience by Eileen Duffy, enters the bedroom and reveals to Katie the full extent of the relationship she had with her brother.
The sound design by Raffaela Pancucci adds to the simmering pot of tension, involving muffled yet persistent techno beats from the party upstairs, displaying that this room is not a refuge from the outside world and drama, but a place where tension will boil over, creating a claustrophobic cocoon of grief, further enhanced by the messy bedroom set design by Anna Kelsey.
Taken through an emotional roller-coaster of Katie’s attempts to reach the truth and reconcile with Roni, directed skilfully by Sarah Stacey, I was hooked by the drama that unfolded, finding every revelation, shocking and tragic and emotionally piercing in the best sort of way, made all the more gripping by Hunter-Gordan’s cleverly timed reveals of information.
It was a play with profound moments of tenderness, pain, and also love, phenomenally acted by the talented cast members. With dialogue that truly captures the human experience, I look forward to seeing what this talented writer does next.