How to Curse

Synopsis

Marooned in Great Yarmouth, Nick and Miranda are two intensely bright, funny and volatile young people. They may be best friends but Nick is searching for something else. Obsessed with The Tempest, he is convinced that, if only they can find their own Ariel, they’ll be able to conjure a storm. When Will arrives, it looks like all the elements are in place but none of them really understand the powers they are about to release. Bruising, charged and spellbound, How To Curse is Ian McHugh’s first play

Our Review:

17 October 2007

In Shakespeare’s Tempest Caliban snarls that Prospero’s gift of language has merely taught him how to curse. Some of the most inventive sequences in Ian McHugh’s new 80-minute play, his first, are made up of insults and curses, but he has been inspired to emulate Prospero’s rough magic too.

Nick is a reader: his messy squat is full of books and he is as familiar with Virginia Woolf as he is with Coleridge, Keats and Shakespeare. But he is isolated, on edge, yearning for something which he describes as “contriving a shipwreck” and hoping to discover his own Ariel. His friend, a bright middle-class girl, the daughter of a magician, shares his enjoyment of books and is fortuitously named Miranda, while the boy he brings home goes by the name of William - which surely isn’t accidental. He’s a less privileged, more worldly-wise lad, sometimes alarmed at what he’s got into, often in slightly confused control of proceedings. Nick would like to ide...

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