Young Roy Williams has already won four major playwriting awards, three of them for Starstruck which was originally seen at the Tricycle, and a commission from the National Theatre.
But this Birmingham Repertory Theatre production, despite an astutely atmospheric production by Annie Castledine, strikes me with all the force of disappointed expectation. The Gift lasts a protracted 90 minutes, during which it shoots off all over the place and arrives nowhere much. Thematically it's chaotic. Williams tries to wrestle with a family's grief and recriminations after the death of a 23-year-old son, but neither his shrill text nor the likeable actors betray a sense of overwhelming pain.
Williams sets his play in Jamaica where Heather has come from England with daughter Janet to bury her son who has died in irritatingly unexplained circumstances. Designer Liz Cooke stirs interest with a faintly unrealistic set. It consists of the facade of a dilapidated, corrugated-iron house and an open, stoney area decorated with a telegraph pole, which seems to be the family burial ground. The action is intermittently haunted by the plangent delicacies of Timothy Sutton's piano music.
Heather's attempt to persuade her half-sister, Bernice, to raise her son's spirit from the dead is played out against a barrage of distractions. Does Bernice want to marry Clarkey, for whom she doesn't feel the real thing? Surely the neglected Janet is the real spiritualist and has she not a justifiable grudge against her mother? Nothing is resolved, or becomes the cause of conflict or interest. Claire Benedict's handsome Bernice sweeps imperiously around in a red dress, by turns seductive to Nicholas Beveney's Clarkey and reproachful to Doreene Blackstock's Heather, who wears her sorrow far too lightly.
The Gift
