Harper Regan

Synopsis

On a startlingly bright Autumn night in 2006 Harper Regan walked away from her home and her husband and her daughter and she kept walking. She told nobody that she was going. She put everything she ever built at risk. For two lost days and nights, until it looked as though her entire life might unravel, she didn't turn back. From Uxbridge to Stockport to Manchester and back again, Simon Stephens' new play navigates the UK, exploring family, love and delusion; and how to live in a godless universe.

Our Review:

24 April 2008

Is living in Uxbridge such bad news? The titular heroine of Simon Stephens’s compelling new play Harper Regan in the Cottesloe, prompting a magnificent performance from Lesley Sharp, is a character in crisis, out on the edge, poised in flight from her job, her husband and her daughter.

As in his last play, Motortown, which charted an episodic period of non-adjustment in the return to Britain of a serving soldier, Stephens writes the geography of a soul in torment, a spiritual odyssey as well as a physical one. Harper needs to go home to Stockport to visit her dying father. But she also needs to leave Uxbridge, the anonymity of her adopted home near the airport with views across the country towards Oxford.

The play is devised as a series of collisions through which Harper can learn to breathe a new life of self appreciation. The disturbing secret of her marriage may or may not have contributed to this process. A piece of falling masonry has...

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Latest User Review

Barry George - 7 August 2008:

I'd rather watch Emmerdale and I hate Emmerdale. I'm just thankful that I payed £5 for a standing ticket. This was utter rubbish....the writing was poor and the director needs to be sacked. Thanks for wasting 3 hours of my life. Don't see it....

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