Glass Eels

Synopsis

Late August heat, still and heavy, down on the Somerset Levels. A land of water and silt and mud and eels. Something is moving. Unfurling... During a heady hot summer, a young girl’s sexual awakening is coloured by shadows of her early childhood. Written with Leyshon’s characteristic stark lyricism and suffused with the austere poetry of the West Country, Glass Eels dramatises the unconscious world of instinct where the lives of humans, plants and eels are all ruled by the primal rhythms of the wetlands.

Our Review:

10 July 2007

Here we go again. Last time out in Comfort Me with Apples, Somerset playwright Nell Leyshon gave us blight and decay in an orchard. This time, it's heat and arousal by a silt-ridden river where a teenage girl, Lily, misses her drowned mother and hunts down a fellow old enough to be her father.

Her real father is messing around with another woman and her grandfather, a retired mortician, is bossing her about big time, demanding food and scratching his groin as his underpants liquefy in the stifling temperature.

Nell Leyshon and director Lucy Bailey discovered early in their collaboration that they both hailed from the same part of the cider county. The trouble with their rural background is its dreary pessimism, heavy symbolism and inbred, adolescent air of repressed sexuality.

A river runs through Lily's dilapidated, darkly lit house, under its big double bed and around grandpa's work table. The kitchen, too, seems awash with effluent, so dinn...

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Latest User Review

Gareth James - 15 July 2007:

A theatre of such standing as Hampstead and a director with the experience of Lucy Bailey should have pulled the plug on this insubstantial piece before the talents of the cast and creative team were wasted. What is going wrong at Hampstead? It's ages since they staged a cracker at a theatre where they used to come more often than buses....

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