A Prayer For My Daughter

Synopsis

The squad room of a downtown precinct. One am, the day after the 4th of July. Through the steaming summer night, two policemen interrogate two murder suspects. By dawn the cops have learned more about themselves than about the murder - about what they have murdered in themselves to become who they are. It's a dark, bleak, hilarious journey of discovery, a classic of 1970s New York.

Our Review:

7 February 2008

Wishing his daughter well for a ceremonial marriage, WB Yeats observed that “arrogance and hatred are the wares peddled in the thoroughfares”, and the American playwright Thomas Babe (who died in 2000) took this sentiment, as well as his title, from that resonant poem.

Babe’s 1977 play – seen here at the Royal Court a year later – is set on a hot and steamy Fourth of July in a downtown New York police station, where two cops and two crooks are locked in a system of interrogation that gradually broadens into a debate about masculinity, the woman within the man and, more specifically, the man within the daughter.

If the writing were not so powerful and poetic, you could deduce the play was a little over-schematic in its gay wish-fulfilment set-up. Frank Kelly (Matthew Marsh), the alcoholic Irish desk sergeant, is in a frenzy of anxiety over one suicidal daughter while another daughter is staying unhelpfully put in Vermont. His sidekick Jack Delasante (Corey Johnson) has ...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

Joesmith - 4 March 2008:

This show has the best direction and acting in London at the moment.It is an absolute stonker and further proof that Colin Morgan is set for a great future....

Read more and add your own review