Lungs: Paines Plough – Brighton Festival 2015

Paines Plough’s mobile theatre space is an intimate and impressive venue, ideally suited to this intimate and impressive work. Performed by Sian Rees-Williams and Abdul Sails with extraordinary passion, power and delicacy, this contemporary tale of a relationship destroyed is in one breath funny and in the next deeply moving, disturbing too. The couple battle, hurt, console and finally combust. Their arguments about the state of the planet, the pressure of bringing a child into a work already stretched are poignant, but are they not just a screen for the real fear of the responsibility of parenthood? Deflecting the terror, not facing up to the realities of their situation they crash and burn, their love turns to hate and to venom, their passion to anger. Scarily real, prize fighters in the ring, this is the sort of theatre that makes me hungry to see more.
Lungs
Roundabout
Brighton Festival 2015
Andrew Kay
5 stars