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Blackbird, David Harrower's critically acclaimed drama, was first performed to rapturous audiences at last year's Edinburgh International Festival. But now, on its transfer to the West End, this taboo-challenging play rather disappoints.
This is partly because it feels like a murky retread of Lolita and Oleanna, and also because it features one of the most ludicrously dramatic endings that London theatre-goers are likely to see all year.
Set in a litter strewn staff canteen - the mess seemingly representative of the character's inner turmoil - Blackbird tells the tale of Una and Ray, who meet again 15 years after their relationship ended. But this was no conventional love affair, Una was just 12-years-old when they first slept together and Ray was a 40-year-old friend of the family.
Now, more than a decade after Ray has served his time in prison, for molesting and attempting to run away with a minor, Una has tracked him down to confront him with their past. But is she there to rebuke him or re-conquer him?
Shocking and frenzied at times, the pair exchange blows as they make sense of their concupiscent history. Ray is convinced he is not a pederast, but that he truly cared for her: "You knew more about love than I did I," he tells her; while Una is also certain that the feelings she had for him were love.
Jodhi May does well to get such a strong grip on a girl as unhinged and volatile as Una but her performance inevitably slips into melodrama. Psychotic in her desire, Una preens and thrusts herself at Ray, she is every inch the coquette, at once drawn to and repulsed by the man that destroyed her life.
At first Roger Allam's Ray shrugs her off, annoyed that she has tracked him down to the cosy factory where he now works. He maintains that his actions all those years ago don't haunt him still. "When I was 40 I had an illegal relationship with a minor. I made the biggest, most stupid mistake of my life," he says in a dry monotone and you see him physically deflate as she attacks him with the litany of abuse she suffered.
But the longer they stay trapped together in this grubby refectory, you begin to realise that whatever has passed between them, wrong or right, pure or impure, they are each others' kryptonite, each others' Achilles' heel.
That their desire cannot be tempered comes to a head in a final scene replete with blockbuster movie devices and a clumsy scene change which shifts the drama to an underground car park. And it is here that the lovers duel. They tussle and grapple' kick and bite and scream. It is a frenzy of legs and arms, this is love, sex, death, everything all at once and ends with them marooned together in the middle of the stage.
Blackbird is a powerful production, that explores the outer limits of morality, of sexual desire, of the impact of the past on the present, of what love means - but to be fully appreciated, it needs to be seen, as Harrower has said, not just as an issue-led piece but as a metaphor for something else.
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