The Sweetest Swing in Baseball

Synopsis

Dana was the toast of the art world - a hot property. Her latest exhibition bombs and she is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. It may be the safest place for her but her insurance will only pay for ten days. An unlikely friendship and strange alliance develop, Dana draws on the inspiration of American baseball star Darryl Strawberry - he had the sweetest swing.

Our Review:

1 April 2004

You can’t help but suspect that Rebecca Gilman must have been deeply wounded once by a review. Although The Sweetest Swing in Baseball concerns a painter rather than a playwright, it appears to tap into some very personal feelings about critical, and other forms of professional, rejection.

The sense of semi-autobiography in Ian Rickson’s premiere production is heightened by the casting of Gillian Anderson as depressive artist Dana Fielding, who attempts suicide after the media’s mauling of her latest exhibition. Anderson’s 2002 West End debut in What the Night Is For proved popular with audiences - who voted her Best Actress in last year’s Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers’ Choice Awards – but it didn’t go down well with the critics.

While that experience hardly drove the former X Files star into a mental asylum, as happens to Fielding, it’s easy to imagine how it could fill her with the extra venom here to really spit...

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216.148.246.91) - 5 December 2004:

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