Theatre review: Someone Who'll Watch Over Me

9:52am Wednesday 27th September 2006

THREE men, chained up for months on end in a filthy cell. This might not sound like your idea of a good night out at the theatre. Nor mine.

Indeed the play started with a character ranting about the boredom. Not a flying start.

But don't let this put you off. Someone Who'll Watch Over Me is a powerful and beautifully crafted piece of theatre.

It is packed with vivid emotion and several in the audience were openly crying at various moments during the play.

But it is not mawkish or sentimental and is spiked with wry humour.

Kevin Watt plays Edward, a cynical, hard-drinking-and-gambling Irish journalist.

Mark Curtis is the earnest, devout American doctor Adam.

The pair are imprisoned in the Lebanon. They don't know by whom, why, for how long or whereabouts they are. The list of unknowns is terrifying. They don't even know if they'll live to see another day.

Not that days mean anything in their windowless underground cell.

Adam has been incarcerated the longest, and balances on a psychological high wire between strict moral and physical discipline, and cracking up.

The pair's monotony is disrupted one day by a new arrival. Robert Maskell plays a scholarly, donnish professor, who wakes, bewildered and terrified, to find himself in hell.

The unlikely trio have a constantly shifting, intense relationship - varying from deep love and care to irritation, derision and disgust.

They escape their shackles through imagination, journeying through football matches, horse races and raucous cocktail bars.

They bare their lives and souls to each other. Always in the menacing, lethal shadow of their unseen Arab captors, listening outside the door.

The cast make a compellingly watchable team. Watt and Curtis are Broadway studio veterans, giving excellent performances in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest earlier this year.

The play is by Frank McGuinness, who was inspired by conversations with Brian Keenan, held prisoner for four and a half years by Islamic Jihad.

While Keenan's ordeal took place in the 80s, the current events across the globe make the play feel disturbingly topical.

The set - designed by Georgia Lowe, with lighting by Kath O'Sullivan -vividly evokes the heat and grime of the miserable cell.

The audience line the sides of the acting space so that uncomfortable proximity to the actors heightens the sense of claustrophobia.

An indiscernible, foreboding soundtrack helps to transport you far away from the bustle of a Catford evening to a pit of fear, somewhere in the Middle East's heart of darkness.

If I've made this sound unremittingly grim, it's not. At two and a quarter hours including interval it's no easy ride, but it is packed with human drama, tenderness and wit. Those in the audience who were crying often found themselves laughing through their tears.

Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, to October 7. Broadway Studio Theatre, Catford Broadway, Catford. Tickets £7-£10, box office 020 8690 0002 or visit broadwaytheatre.org.uk