The Water's Edge

Synopsis

Helen won’t paint the house. Erica is still angry. Nate buries himself in books. No one swims in the lake. Deep in the Massachusetts woods a lakeside mansion slides slowly into disrepair, all change halted after a terrible tragedy many years before. Rich and successful, Richard returns to reclaim it, model girlfriend in tow. But his family still live there, and as he tries to insinuate himself back into their lives, the reason for his departure emerges and seething bitterness and anger boil into shocking action. Caustic, funny, poignant and thought-provoking, The Water’s Edge, echoing Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, flings itself from American naturalism to the heart of Greek Tragedy, where revenge and murder lurk unseen.

Our Review:

9 February 2009

American Theresa Rebeck's neatly conceived The Water's Edge is a contemporary tragedy based on Aeschylus' Oresteia. The Agamemnon of the piece is Richard, a middle-aged charmer who turns up - concubine in tow - on the doorstep of his wife and two kids in rural Massachusetts, 14 years after walking out.

With typical masculine chutzpah, Richard assumes his arrival will enable him to heal a rift with the grown-up children he barely knows, whilst at the same time allowing him to peacefully resettle them so he can move back to his lakeside childhood home they are currently occupying. This paradoxical motivation, coupled with the fact his estranged wife Helen blames him for the drowning of their third child (before he left), makes his quest for atonement a doomed one.

This is engaging, well structured, resonant drama. And there is little to fault in the performances, with Madeleine Potter lending suitably hellish fury ...

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