Kingdom of the Earth, The Print Room, Dir Lucy Bailey, Design Ruth Sutcliffe
Terrific. It’s got everything: complicated love, sibling rivalry, beauty in the bleak, fragility and three strong characters that interleave and lock horns in a bid for status and ultimate survival. Lot has come home to die but intends to thwart his half-brother’s due inheritance by producing a wife. The levee is rising and the three are isolated from help or hope. This production is biblical in its proportions: the mud mountain set, like a modern-day Sinai, is ingeniously used throughout. The kingdom of the earth is fought over by a dark complected guy, a show biz variety girl and Lot who sits at its top, Norman-Bates style in an armchair, dressed all in white, TB-ridden, who like his biblical counterpart, turns his back towards his dead mother. The performances are uniformly excellent, the direction taut, intelligent, theatrical with a soundscape of the Mississippi created by drips, rain and an eerie percussive score worthy of Hitchcock’s Bernard Herrmann…..Fantastic!
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