The Night Season

Synopsis

Late at night, shoeless, in the rain, an actor playing Yeats in a film shows up at his Sligo digs. Three feisty sisters lie dreaming upstairs, but in the morning, down they come, burning to meet the new lodger. While their father's intent on an early glass of whiskey and a date with the local barmaid, the youngest daughter shows the actor to his bedroom... A funny, modern, intoxicated tale of love, loss and families.

Our Review:

4 August 2004

How wonderful to see an exciting new play about women – finely written by a woman (only her second play), sensitively directed by a woman (Lucy Bailey) and also beautifully performed by women.

As an actress herself, author Rebecca Lenkiewicz knows full well how few good meaty roles there are for women in theatre, so her quartet of ladies – Sarah-Jane Drummey, Justine Mitchell and Susan Lynch as the three lovelorn and sex-starved Kennedy sisters and Annette Crosbie as their batty grandmother – should be thankful she’s written The Night Season and ensured that the wealth is liberally distributed.

That isn’t to say that the wealth is strictly limited by gender. Into this ramshackle Sligo household harem enter three somewhat skittish but ultimately sympathetic men. As the reluctant patriarch, David Bradley is on fine comic form. Abandoned by the girls’ mother ten years ago, he finds solace in drink, literary allusions and a scantily clad bar...

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Latest User Review

82.43.174.92) - 16 November 2004:

My high expectations turned to disappointment - The Night Season was unfocused, sentimental, far too long and repetitive, and was relentlessly shallow, always inserting a jokey line just when it needed to make a more serious point. So often the Irish are presented as quaint and folksy oddballs, and this play seemed tailor-made to suit such preconceptions. It was a waste of an excellent cast who did their best to bring it to believable life. The staging was a mess with its scattering of random furniture, and why the water-feature which could hardly be seen because of the watery lighting superimposed on top of it? I see no reason to apply 'positive discrimination' just because it's 'about' women and written by one too. These women lost my sympathy as surely as they outstayed their welcome....

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