REVIEWED: ISLAND STATE

So Dom Riley, the writer of the play ‘Island State’ had read his Beckett.

The play opened with two rather lonesome looking figures on stage facing away from each other – the history and tension between them palpable. However, unfortunately, that is where the connection between the two playwrights ended. Indeed ‘Island State’ made you realise how great the ‘greats’ really are. In all honesty I do commend Dom for his production. The acting was very good with two robust actresses coming to grips with the roles, and at moments the play was funny. I enjoyed the tennis imagery and the ‘I spy’ game. The filmic projection at the beginning and middle was also well done and set the scene well, along with the very simple scattering of the sand to represent the movement of the tide which I felt was effective.

It was however the play itself that I had a problem with. Unfortunately, for me, it was overkill. The imagery of power, the importance of names, the ‘game’ imagery, the Lord of the Flies-esque reduction to a primal state, and the blatant debate between whether the ‘brutal’ or the ‘kind’ would survive became too much. There was a failure to understand that in a situation as crazed as the potential end of the world subtlety could be more effective than bold displays of emotion.  Indeed the strongest moments of the play for me were the instants of joviality, making the condition more poignant, and the rare times when questions were left unanswered. For example, I felt I would have it more moving not to know that Marilyn had killed her mother.

There were also a few, yet still jarring, discrepancies in the play. Marilyn talked about having to fight tooth and nail to have survived. Yet the last two survivors were both women. Josephine, a princess, was home-taught by her mother (the Queen that is) and ‘hidden’ for not being male – in the year 2046 AD? There was also an underlying sense that, surely, by 2046, there would have been some better way of surviving a flood than simply moving to ‘higher’ ground. I would hope that would be the case even now.

I do not wish to seem unduly harsh on this work. It did have moments of clarity and again I commend the actresses on their fine performances. It is easy to forget how hard and brave it is to write your own work. It simply for me was trying to do too much. However the fact that so many ideas were being played with and developed can only be a positive thing for the future of Dom’s writing career and I look forward to seeing his next project.