Silent Engine

Synopsis

A young couple travel to Devon to try to come to terms with the loss of their baby and discover a village that has fallen into the sea. The ruins of one house remain, like their marriage, perilously close to the edge and the shadows of the lost loom over them as they recriminate with one another and with God.

Our Review:

11 September 2002

Pentabus theatre’s production of Julian Garner’s new play Silent Engine opened at the Ludlow assembly rooms in July and went on to wow audiences and critics alike at the Edinburgh Festival where it won the Fringe First award. It’s with this impressive reputation that it starts its nationwide tour at the Arcola theatre, but is it really worth motoring all the way to Dalston for?

We meet married couple Anna and Bill on a cliff above a remote beach in Devon, the site of a terrible catastrophe at the turn of the century, when a village was washed into the sea. As the couple interact we become painfully aware of the breakdown in communications between them since the death of their only daughter. Poor brow-beaten Bill can’t get a word in with his melodramatic wife, Anna. She is a loathsome drama queen who romanticizes every tragic aspect of her own and other-peoples lives reveling in the idea of families drowning at the mercy of the ocean.

The pretext is...

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