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Review Round-up: Sharp Shines in Harper Regan

Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens’ new play Harper Regan premiered at the National Theatre last Wednesday (23 April 2008, previews from 19 April), directed by NT associate Marianne Elliot and starring Lesley Sharp in the title role (See News, 16 Jan 2008). It runs in rep at the NT Cottesloe until 9 August.

The play tells of how, on a bright autumn night in 2006, Uxbridge housewife Harper Regan walks away from her home, her husband and her daughter and keeps on walking. And for two lost days and nights, until it looks as though her entire life might unravel, she doesn’t turn back. Harper Regan explores themes of family, love, discovery and delusion, as its ever-present titular character struggles to deal with a series of personal crises.

Writer Simon Stephens, a former resident dramatist at the Royal Court, won best new play at the 2005 Laurence Olivier Awards for On the Shores of the Wide World, which also had its London premiere in the NT Cottesloe. His follow-up, Motortown proved a critical success in 2006. Known for his authentic and often brutal studies of working-class life, Stephens’ other works include Bluebird, One Minute, Country Music and Pornography.

While overnight critics were somewhat lukewarm in their response to Harper Regan, there was almost unanimous praise for Lesley Sharp’s in the title role. Sharp, who remains onstage throughout, was described variously as “wonderful”, “stunning” and “deserving of awards”. However, despite the strength of Sharp’s central performance, many critics had reservations about the play's “artistically misjudged” use of graphic violence and often “meandering” narrative.

Ian Shuttleworth in the Financial Times - “Have you ever found yourself, in the middle of a crowd, wonderstruck by the notion of such a vast number of full, complex and independent lives – of separate universes, in effect, as far as those at their respective centres are concerned? This, I think, is something akin to the driving preoccupation of Simon Stephens’ playwriting… Lesley Sharp’s delivery of her lines is unchangingly affectless and a little stilted, as well as devoid of any Mancunian accent. In the course of the second half, we begin to realise that she is both dominated by and armoured against her own central issue, the reason her family moved south – her husband’s conviction for a sex offence – and see her family’s first faltering steps towards dealing with their own continuing individual and collective relationships… Although it feels to me somewhat over-familiar in terms of Stephens’ output, I am always gratified to experience this kind of trust in an audience’s ability and willingness to look beneath an apparently unexceptional surface.”

- by Theo Bosanquet

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	Harper Regan - 24th Apr 2008 reviews