Port

Synopsis

Stockport, 1988. It's midnight. Rachel, eleven, and Billy, six, wait in the car in agitated excitement. Their mother is at her wits' end with all their chatter and fighting and dreams of Disneyland. She is about to leave them for good. Their father, drunk in the flat above, has locked the door. It's a pivotal moment, the beginning of a thirteen-year odyssey for two kids, largely abandoned and growing up in the deprived suburban shadows of Manchester, a city that felt itself to be the most exciting in the world.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 29 January 2013

"Port" is Stockport, a dismal yet apparently haunting and enigmatic town in the shadow of Manchester - there's a brilliant, illuminating NT programme essay by Paul Morley - that produced the playwright Simon Stephens, who paid it the dubious compliment, ten years ago, of a play in its honour at the Royal Exchange.

That play was directed by Marianne Elliott, who has now re-staged it, with breath-taking panache and bravura, defying the unfriendly proportions of the Lyttelton stage, and giving Stephens' episodic yet elongated scenes a flavour that is brisk, brutal and poetic.

It's a "dreams of leaving" play given a local form and flavour by the music of Morrissey, the tang of the rebarbative dialogue and the peculiar melancholy and determined character of Racheal Keats, played with exceptional guts and savvy by Kate O'Flynn.

Racheal, graduating from bolshie adolescence to early middle-age with a mixture of bravery an...

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Latest User Review

alan - 12 March 2013:

There was some applause - probably for the performance of Kate. But when will directors learn that young actors need to project - particularly when regional accents are strong. But then again, do we really want to hear a dialogue as thin as this? As another commented - a sad waste of National resources. ...

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