‘This was the 3am phone call no mother wants to receive’
One shattered promise.
A high stakes thriller.
From New York Times best-selling author Tawni O’Dell comes the powerful true story of a mother desperately trying to hold her family together after a devastating event changes the course of their lives.
Amanda Abbington (Sherlock, Mr Selfridge) will lead an ensemble cast in this electric piece of new writing that mines the depths of human courage and the resolve to survive following a shattering incident. Directed by Park Theatre’s Artistic Director Jez Bond, this pacy theatrical page-turner propels the audience into the heart of an unmissable drama fuelled by tears, laughter, hope and love.
Tawni O’Dell is a bestselling author on both sides of the Atlantic with titles such as Back Roads, Coal Run and Sister Mine. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages and has been published in over forty countries.
__Assisted Performances__
Captioned Performance - Wednesday 28 Aug 19.30
Despite the import of the events recounted, Jez Bond’s underwhelming production makes it hard to care overmuch about the characters, as Esme drinks too much to mask her pain and slowly spirals out of control, while Tara herself makes some perplexingly rash decisions. On a bare set backed by a half-hearted tracing of the iconic New York skyline, Esme withdraws ever further into herself, with Day hunched and slouching as a pitiful concave shape of a person.
There is a surprising stream of humour throughout, bringing a certain verisimilitude of the fun and levity naturally found in family dynamics, but a crucial, palpable sense of familial bonds is absent. The jokes are commonplace, which is part of the point that this is an account of real life, but it adds to a growing sense that O’Dell’s work is more diary than drama. Tara’s occasionally sardonic take on what she and others could have said, and what they actually did say, jars more on stage than in the script. There is also too much thinly sketched plot and some needless peripheral roles.
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