Making Noise Quietly - Being Friends/Lost/Making Noise Quietly

Synopsis

A conscientious objector and a roaming artist find tenderness as the carnage of World War II unfolds across the Channel and doodlebugs explode in the meadow. A bereaved mother struggles with bitterness and love in recollecting her estranged son, lost in the Falklands. Deep in the Black Forest, an ageing holocaust survivor seeks to bring peace to a disturbed young boy and his equally wild step-father. A delicately poetic triptych of plays, Holman's seminal work paints a very human picture of the subtly devastating effects of war and examines the bonds of suffering shared by us all.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 24 April 2012

It seems strangely regressive of the Donmar to revive Robert Holman’s Making Noise Quietly, an insidious and deftly written bill of three miniaturist plays about the ripples of wartime in three significant encounters first seen at the Bush in 1986.

Although the idea must be to re-focus attention on a quietly impressive, though recently invisible, playwright, only one of the plays comes up as newly reverberating in Peter Gill’s meticulous and beautifully acted production, delicately designed by Paul Wills on a bare stage of muted greens.

That play is Lost in which a naval officer ([John Hollingworth) arrives at the Redcar house of Mary Appleton (Susan Brown) to inform her that her son, his friend, has been killed in action; not in Afghanistan, but in the Falklands.

Small chasms of communication place distance between all the characters whom Gill shows crossing the stage in a sort of private rever...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 18 May 2012:

After the crushing disappointment of watching Southend United crash out of the play-offs the night before, what I really needed was one of London's myriad comedies to lift my mood of despondency. Robert Holman's three short plays linked by a theme of war was probably the worst possible choice at the wrong time. The plays are acted with great sensitivity but the dialogue ranges from poignant to trite. Next up at the Donmar is another obscure title that I am sure few will have heard of and I am not convinced it will continue as a must-visit theatre with such unexciting programming....

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