The Events

This powerfully eccentric play about the aftermath of a mass shooting, by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory librettist David Greig, requires a new choir each time. In Brighton it was the turn of Lewes’ Paddock Singers’ to tackle Brechtian technique and Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’ as they stood for the victims, the grieving community, and the only force, ultimately, that could ‘turn darkness into light’. Amanda Drew’s vicar destroyed herself as she tried to understand the unfathomable. Clifford Samuel struggled to embody the shifts as he played everyone she interrogated in the process, from politicians and therapists to her own girlfriend and the gunman himself. Greig’s writing was best when it forced itself into surprising psychological recesses. There were chilling echoes of Norway’s ‘laughing gunman’ in the shooter’s sudden, mid killing-spree apprehension: ‘this is silly’. So was The Events, but in the most serious way.

Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome, 19 March 2014

Rating: