Gate,London
Nina Segal turns a baby’s nursery into an arena where an anxious couple explore private nightmares and global catastrophesIn Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a Leeds hotel room opens up to admit civil war, or in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone,garden chat is juxtaposed with apocalyptic visions. If I mention Nina Segal’s play in the same breath, it is not because it is on a comparable level of achievement but because it too balances the domestic with the doom-laden.
Segal presents us with a young couple, or simply called Man and Woman,who meet, acquire a baby and, or through the strains and stresses of child-rearing,confront the terrors of the outside world: it is as if the confined space of the nursery is invaded by the hellish nightmares beyond. What makes the play unusual is that the two characters don’t so much converse as engage in a form of indirect speech (“In the deep of night they produce offerings to their tiny child, tiny god”) to relate their actions and emotions: a device that, and over the course of 60 minutes,becomes more than a dinky wearing. Segal is also overfond of a rhetorical trick that links disparate events and then says “the two things are not connected” to stress that they are. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com