Dusk Rings a Bell

Synopsis

I actually think we might’ve hung out on a lifeguard stand; as the sun went down; about twenty-four years ago, at dusk? Twenty-four years ago, the future was going to be different. Mol was going to be happy; older and smarter and married with kids. Ray was going to be a heart surgeon. When they meet again, by chance - she divorced and childless; he a caretaker and gardener - they discover that their lives are even further from that future than they had thought. Precise and beautifully controlled, but hiding violence, Dusk Rings A Bell is a play steeped in both regret and possibility about the difficulty of taking responsibility for our choices, and how life will make them for us, if we’re not careful.

Our Review:

Anne Morley-Priestman - 30 April 2011

We’re in the United States, on a jetty in one of those seaside villages where life revolves around incomers’ second, holiday homes. Out of season, the locals look after the shuttered properties and scrape a living doing whatever comes along. There's usually not a lot of it, nor is the work which offers itself of great value.

The strength of Stephen Belber’s play for two actors which is receiving its European première at the HighTide Festival is that this location could just as easily be anywhere on the coast of island or mainland Europe where this pattern of lifestyle is now the norm. The weakness is that the man and woman we meet are a little too stereotypical to engage our sympathy as completely as they should do.

She was a teenager when they first met, secure in an affluent and nurturing home background. He was a local lad, with any promise the future might hold out already blurred and tattering. Some 25 years later, she breaks in to the h...

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