Colder Than Here

Laura Wade’s Colder Than Here is a surprising play.  There isn’t very much plot, and what there is can be deduced from the start: Myra (Corrinne James) has bone cancer.  In the first scene, we meet her reviewing a potential burial plot with her younger daughter, Jenna (Laura Dacey).  From there on, it can only go in one direction.  Nevertheless, it keeps the audience gripped all the way through as Myra leads her family through preparations for her death.  The pathos is to be expected, but you don’t really expect a play about a slow, painful death to have so many laughs in it.

Whilst the focus is on the funeral arrangements, Myra’s real project is her family - trying to get them to understand, or, at the very least, talk to one another.  Jenna’s older sister is Harriet (Susie Lewis).  She’s the bright one, the organised one, the one with everything under control, whilst Jenna’s life is a scatty, sweary mess, particularly her relationship with her boyfriend, something she and her father can’t discuss.  Alec, the father (Peter Andrews) makes taciturnity an art-form.  He has two modes of speech: exasperated and grumpy.

The sets alternated between various burial grounds and the living room of the family home.  The Chesil has a very restricted stage space, so that these sets largely overlapped.  The outdoor locations (and, indeed, seasons) were differentiated by images on a screen on the back wall.  This proved very effective, with each image a perfect complement to the dialogue.

A lot of detailed thought from actors and director had gone into each of the performances, with every small movement conveying something about character or mood.  Sometimes it was to comic effect - Alex pausing to look for his glasses, and finding them on his head - at other times, there were sadder reminders of Myra’s increasing fragility.  In the middle of the play, whilst not the focus of the scene, Harriet was absent-mindedly scratching the back of her hand.  Is that an actor fidgeting?  No, two scenes later she admitted to having eczema; whilst her sister was getting her life back together, Harriet was beginning to show the strain.  And that was really the trajectory of the play; there was never going to be a perfect ending, but the family grew closer together.

A very satisfying piece.

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