Review: Chichester Festival's "stark" productions

Chichester Festival has revived Debbie Tucker-Green's 'Random', in a double-bill together with 'Generations'. This hypnotically repetitive meditation on the Aids crisis in South Africa sees the cast walk off one by one, beginning with the youngest, and the survivors repeat the scene over and again, in ever more elegiac tones, while the South African Cultural Choir provide the poignantly vibrant entr'actes. This is a truly gripping evening, although the playbill description of the evening as 'warm and funny' ignores the shiver which these pieces send through our bones.

In Random, at 7.37am the digital alarm clock (the sole object on the blank stage which serves as Petra Letang's bed - although the walk-ways below the stage are littered with a teenager's abandoned clutter) wakens a young Black British woman to her humdrum day, ready to go to her dead-end job. That clock, reproduced on the bare back wall, steers us through the horrors of the day to come, before getting stuck at "00.00", the groundhog hour of aching pain. Letang's irritating teenage brother has her phone-charger and won't give it back. He emerges from his own fetid den late for school again, while the monosyllabic dad snoozes after nightshift and Mum skirmishes with her daughter in the kitchen.

Off the daughter goes to work and the pettiness of office politics, a pettiness shattered by the urgent text from Mum at 2.13: "Come Home, now!" Two policemen in the front room still in their boots, polluting mother's house-pride, while Dad, who hates the police, slips extra sugar in their tea to express his disdain. A lunchtime stabbing by a gang, for reasons that we never fathom, leads Letang, after an identification visit to the morgue, to take final refuge in the fetid den her brother left behind, inhaling the heady scent of tragedy. The most extraordinary aspect of this highly topical play (apart from the fact that it was penned in 2008 and not in response to this year's crop of young bloods' butcherings) is that it is a monologue. Stellar acting, stark production.

See it at Chichester's Minerva Theatre until June 2 - or hope that it then tours to somewhere close to home.

Rob Esdaile is Parish Priest of Our Lady of Lourdes, Thames Ditton, in Arundel and Brighton Diocese.