CITY TRIBUNE
Superb performances in drama where strangers’ lives collide
Druid: Once Upon a Bridge
REVIEW BY JUDY MURPHY
Theatre is a funny beast. When we go to a play, we do so to be transported out of our daily lives and to have our emotions played with. But it’s important that, while we’re being manipulated (in a good way), we’re sufficiently transported by both play and production that we don’t realise that’s happening. If we do, the spell is broken.
In Druid Theatre’s fine production of Once Upon a Bridge, which was streamed live from the company’s Mick Lally Theatre last week, that niggling awareness of being played with was present in the background almost all through.
Sonya Kelly’s drama, about three strangers whose lives collide on London’s Putney Bridge one morning in May, has beautiful writing and great imagery but, at times, her attempts to tie up any loose ends become visible, to the detriment of the magic. In this three-hander that explores the erratic nature of human emotions and behaviour, not all loose ends need to be tidied.
The characters are listed simply in the programme: as a Woman, a Man and A Bus Driver, played by Siobhán Cullen, Aaron Monaghan and Adetomiwa Edun respectively. They are a financier, an aspiring Irish legal eagle and an immigrant bus driver.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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