OUR NEXT PRODUCTIONS

David Mamet’s Oleanna is a thought-provoking play that looks at the issue of sexual harassment on-campus in a radical light. On stage are two characters. An under-grad student, waiting, seated in front of her professor, whose class she has flunked, to discuss her grades. He is on the phone, discussing the impending purchase of his house. He starts addressing the student. She starts fumbling for words, starts taking notes, the exorcism begins! Before the play is halfway through, the Professor is brought before Tenure Committee for sexual harassment,

Who is right, who is wrong? In the process, it questions the basic fabric of the entire society. Oleanna is a play subtitled as: Which ever side you take, you are wrong.

Book Tickets Here

A stream of reminiscence that flows between a mother and a young man connected by the violent, tragic death of the woman’s son, in one sense it suggests the succour derived from the sharing of stories. Yet it also conveys powerfully the way in which fiercely held fictions within families, while they remain unchallenged, prop up the familial construct at the cost of dangerously defining and restricting the individuals within it and their relationships.

The plot twists in Ridley’s play are predictable, and its pared-down structure lacks dramatic interest. But the dark subtleties eddying beneath its surface tug fiercely at the emotions and the imagination.

Anita’s son, Vincent, was found savagely murdered in an East End lavatory; Davey found the body. The exchanges they share, in which agony and comfort are cruelly twinned, bring both the mother – who had denied her son’s homosexuality – and the boy – with whom Vincent had a secret link – a kind of redemption. Their relationship shifts from the suspicion of two strangers confronting one another over an atrocity to a mother-son protectiveness, with Davey as Anita’s surrogate child, and even to an explosion of confused Oedipal passion.

Ridley scatters poetic fragments throughout, like a trail of bread-crumbs leading to the supposed safety of home. The lightness of the snow that fell as Vincent died echoes the feathers that Anita once sewed into his angel wings for the school Nativity play. Icy shards recall the glass pressed by his attackers into his eyes. A bloody handprint on the wall of the lavatory is a splinter of an identity, the fraction we allow ourselves to know of a person if we refuse to see what we don’t want to.

Book Tickets Here