Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me

7pm, Corpus Playroom, 11-15th March, £6/£5

An American, an Englishman and an Irishmen are taken in hostage in Lebanon.

It sounds like the love child of the BBC World News and a vaguely racist joke and for the first 15 minutes or so ‘Someone who’ll watch over me’ plays out like the bastard offspring of the two.

Caricatured national stereotypes of the alcoholic Irishman Ed (Justin Blanchard), posh Brit Michael (Douglas Tawn) and arrogant American Adam (Elias Wynshaw) deride each other and their Arab captors whilst sporadically breaking into moments of anger at their situation. It feels uneasy, to put it mildly, as the racist humour is uncomfortable and the angsty outbursts feel forced. The stereotyping of the characters makes them alien to the audience and the fact that nothing is seen or heard of the guards makes atmosphere of a hostage situation difficult to conjure up. The audience feel very distant and at first it seems like playwright Frank McGuinness has totally fudged the difficult art of dark humour.

However, as the play progresses for the next hour and 45 minutes, one’s perspective shifts entirely as the characters are more deeply developed.   The turning point is a fantastic scene in which the American breaks down and fantasises about murdering an Arab family out of retribution. For the first time in the performance the audience is seized by the neck and thrown into a blooming catharsis, and for the first time too the Irishman’s bravado and the Brit’s stiff upper lip feel truly shattered as they are overtaken by the same shock as the audience: we see the protagonists as humans. The characters are immediately more relatable and suddenly the genius of the play is made clear.

Pulled into the hostage situation along with the characters

Yes, the audience feels uncomfortable at the start of the piece – but this should be expected since we are entering into a world of unstable strangers. We are a new inmate of sorts who is initially unaccustomed with and wary of the new characters but comes to understand them as people and is drawn into their world. The emotional depth of the characters is laid bare in their moments of crisis, anger and reminiscence. The most notable of these is the powerful account of a father’s passing by Ed – and power of these instances is reinforced by moments of comedy. As the play goes on the comic feels more and more naturally interwoven with the dramatic, and the sight of the prisoners wholeheartedly miming a party for them and the guards creates a lovely contrast between their almost boyish enthusiasm and the haunting emptiness of the bare set. Moments like this and the superb acting throughout create a poignant mixture of happiness and sadness and do tug on our heartstrings somewhat.

The piece is not perfect by any means. The invisibility and silence of the guards for example makes the intensity of the situation feel frustratingly under-developed; but we are certainly pulled in. Come the ending I did scratch my eye, wondering if a tear would emerge.