Like a Fishbone

Synopsis

A remote valley. An unspeakable crime. A prominent architect is commissioned to design a memorial to the victims. On the eve of the presentation of the memorial to the public, a blind woman comes out of the rain and into the architect's studio. She is the mother of one of the victims and she demands to be heard. Over the next hour the two women do battle over what it means to memorialise the dead, what it means to be a mother and what it means to believe. Like A Fishbone is both a psychological thriller and a haunting puzzle about faith, compassion and the danger of telling the truth.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 15 June 2010

In his first play at the Bush, 2,000 Feet Away, Australian actor/writer Anthony Weigh closed in quirkily on small minds, gluttony, puritanism and paedophilia in small-town America and served notice of a talent to amuse and bemuse in equal measure.

His new play, Like a Fishbone, directed like the first by Bush artistic director Josie Rourke, is almost abstract in comparison, pitting an unnamed architect (Deborah Findlay) against a blind, bereaved mother (Sarah Smart) of a child caught up in a school massacre. It’s also a debate about how accurately an artist should interpret the demands of a commission.

There’s a balancing, intermediary presence of the architect’s intern (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), but the main theme of a taut, tense 80 minutes is the idea that a memorial to the children should either conserve the school, like jam, as it was on that fateful day; or be obliterated as a mark of respect, which is what the supp...

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