Nightingale and Chase ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L TO R) Christopher Fulford, Jody Watson

Photography by John Haynes

Director Richard Wilson, Designer Angela Davies, Lighting Designer Johanna Town, Sound Designer Paul Arditti

Cast: Christopher Fulford, Jody Watson.

‘Jailbirds do not sing, Chase does not even have the will to speak when her partner, Nightingale, picks her up from jail (she has done 10 months for shop lifting). Nightingale doesn’t sing either (in spite of his name). Zinnie Harris – whose first play, Further Than the Furthest Thing, won the Evening Standard’s Most Promising Playwright award – writes with flair about two people with no saving graces. She knows them but they don’t know each other or themselves. They are wrapped up in her writing and given away. She turns them in.

‘This is a writer’s play and by conventional standards, wilfully un-theatrical. There is no dialogue and almost no action. The evening consists of a sequence of monologues but it would not be true to say that it would do better as a radio play. Richard Wilson directs with forensic care (the piece is bleak but not depressing) and I would no have missed Christopher Fulford’s performance as Nightingale. He sits inside a circle (Anglea Davies’s set suggest a not-so-comic thought bubble) and describe’s Chase’s disastrous homecoming.’

Observer

‘… Nightingale, a middle-aged working-class man, goes first. He tells us about bringing Chase home from an institution – we are unsure at first whether it is penal or psychiatric – where she has been for the past 10 months. He has carefully planned their evening – kid at his sister’s, nice dinner, bottle of bubbly – but Chase won’t play along. The reunion, edgy from the start, crumbles, then explodes. ‘In my head I am just watching her calm, like my dad. But it isn’t what my arms are doing, they are doing this other thing.’

‘Christopher Fulford portrays Nightingale with enormous sympathy for this man, who tries hard to live up to rules he but dimly comprehends, and who never ceases to be surprised when other people don’t play fair. His body is stiff with propriety, his hands make little aborted gestures. Chase runs off. The story continues with her monologue, describing her life in prison, where she was sent for fraud, and her equally dispiriting life with Nightingale, 20 years older, with whom she has lived since she was 16.’

Indpendent

“Given the huge success of her hit from last year, Further Than The Furthest Thing, a new play by the young Scotland-based writer Zinnie Harris is bound to be a major theatre event, and although her new show in the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court is a much more modest affair, there’s something about its combination of narrative toughness and piercing psychological delicacy that doesn’t disappoint.”

“Harris’s writing has poise and humanity, the actors (Christopher Fulford and Jody Watson) are focused and forceful, and the final moments leave us gasping at the pity of it all, the waste of life, and love.”

The Scotsman