BLOOD BANK
BLOOD BANK, Ensemble Theatre, 16 October-22 November 2015. Photography by Clare Hawley: above - Tom Stokes, Meredith Penman and Gabrielle Scawthorn; right: Gabrielle Scawthorn.
Christopher Harley’s play first saw daylight as part of the Ensemble Stages 2013 Spring Reading and has been in the works since then. With Anthony Skuse – one of our best directors – in charge, the final result is just about everything one could hope for in a new play. It’s well crafted, funny and original yet also takes familiar themes and gives them a sharply satisfying fresh twist.
In an impersonal and obviously chilly hospital waiting room, Michael (Tom Stokes) is waiting to donate blood for his desperately ill brother Justin (also Tom Stokes). He is skittish with nerves and just wants to be left in peace with an old home improvement magazine for company.
Unfortunately for Michael, someone else is also waiting. Abbey (Gabrielle Scawthorn) is incapable of silence or minding her own business and the opening scenes where she forces Michael into conversation are brilliantly enraging as well as funny.
Abbey is a total pain and not so much oblivious to herself as simply merrily obnoxious. And because she hangs about the hospital – making cut out get-well cards to give to people to cheer them up – she inevitably meets Justin and against the odds and unknown to Michael, romance blooms.
What happens next – and what happened to the brothers when they were children – is played out in intriguing vignettes devised by AV designer Tim Hope and projected on the plain walls of Tobhiyah Stone Feller’s set (shared with My Zinc Bed and also lit by Nicholas Higgins).
And what plays out during the long hours Michael must wait and the longer hours of Justin’s staring into his bleak future is seen at different angles as their relationship with Abbey spins the wheel of misfortune and misunderstanding. Punctuating – and occasionally puncturing – the triangle is Meredith Penman as the scrubs-clad nurse who dips in and out with more skill and conviction than this half-baked role deserves (the only major flaw in the play).
Scawthorn is superb as the well meaning but hopelessly exasperating Abbey and Stokes is equally fine as the two very different brothers. What happens to them is neither obvious nor unlikely; it’s a slice of life at the sharp end of experience and is both touching and funny by turns.
New plays are notoriously difficult to get off the ground and this one deserves its excellent cast and director, all of whom not only get it off the ground but make it fly. Recommended.
