Eclipse Review – W1A creator’s dark comedy about life and death in Devon | Theater

ATV writer John Morton specializes in English expressions that mean nothing or something different than what is said. In the sitcoms Twenty Twelve, W1A and now Twenty-sixcynicism, repetition and offensive metaphors – in conversations that sound familiar but precisely written – reveal the arrogance and hypocrisy of the industry. But the unflinching and unflinching tone of Morton’s play, Eclipse, represents the unspeakable and unspeakable things between the family of Edward, a terminally ill cancer patient who has asked to die under “hospice” care at an old house in Devon.

Edward, locked behind a door in the corner of the kitchen with a certain presence that overlooks Simon Higlett’s place, is not seen or heard but he feels real. The illusion of the theater remembers the professional theater of the people who played it, Alan Ayckbourn, as it does for many of us who we see: his quarreling brothers Jonathan (Rupert Penry-Jones) and Sarah (Sarah Parish), inconsistent and determined respectively, and the last one was a heartless, irrational husband (Paul Thornley, Graham). The pair of nurses at the end – the attentive Karen (Selina Cadell) and the self-absorbed Linda (Lizzie Hopley) – are classic types of English drama.

Ayckbourn takes the English family into a dark place but Morton continues, the laughs are deliberately suppressed as the death progresses. The last pictures are like a sequel The end of David Eldridgeand about a person who is close to death, but which led to the audience not receiving medical treatment. The theater is silent, the people indifferent, admit that the actors remember or expect such horrors.

Morton’s unique offering is the sound of words — ums, stumbles, yes that mean no — laid out like musical notes in a plaintive voice that sings with little notes. A five-page detailed account of whether a battered patient can eat yogurt and, if so, the taste reveals the depths of family, clinical psychology, depression and another haunted death by one person.

In economic times, it is interesting for Chichester to employ, in the Minerva studio, 10 actors, four with one show each. But this large group needs to represent the crowded house that the house of death can be. As the district nurse and local GP, Katharine Bennett-Fox and Maanuv Thiara show that the life behind the characters is important. Morton’s movements are exactly as they are written, with little focus on a watch that has a lot of power. It was scary that there might not be a new life for the theater in death but Eclipse has found it.