On the Shore of the Wide World

Synopsis

Stockport 2004. Peter Holmes' dad is mastering his card tricks. His sons are plotting ways of leaving home. His wife has never looked so tired. And something is about to happen that will change all their lives forever. Set over the course of nine months, On the Shore of the Wide World is an epic play about love, family, Roy Keane and the size of the galaxy. It is also a play about recovery.

Our Review:

31 May 2005

My colleague Glenn Meads reviewed Simon Stephens’ big, bold domestic family drama On the Shore of the Wide World (see below) when it premiered at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in April. There, he found it both too long and too circuitous, but noted its ambition and good intentions. Something good has clearly happened in the transfer to the rather more intimate Cottesloe where – reconfigured to have the audience seated in the round as at Manchester – it now emerges as a beautiful, poignant slice of theatrical realism.

It’s true that the style is sometimes televisual in the fractured nature of the narrative’s telling and the fact that the action is telescoped into cross-cutting scenes from the lives of three generations of a Stockport family. But audiences – and writers like Stephens – have been trained by television to absorb information in a different way now, and are far quicker at picking up on the trail of reverberating emotions that this famil...

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Latest User Review

62.6.139.13) - 29 July 2005:

The key word in Mark Shenton's review is "televisual" as this is just like watching a rather soapy TV drama. Although the extended Holmes family are put through a range of situations, love, children moving away, grief, frustration, etc I didn't feel that Simon Stephens had anything particularly new to say about any of it. The play is lifted above mediocrity by some outstanding acting, especially from Nicholas Gleaves as Peter, struggling to come to terms with the changes in his previously predictable life. This was an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours, especially at just £10 for a prime seat, but it will not stick in the memory for long....

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