Randomly brilliant

Random, Royal Court
****

Random is just fifty minutes long. But who needs more time when you can fit this much in?

The performance alone by Nadine Marshall is unbelievably good, deserving of some Best Actress nominations.

As she stands alone on the Jerwood Theatre stage, in semi darkness, all eyes are on her. Marshall holds the attention and imagination for the entire piece, bringing to life playwright’s Debbie Tucker Green’s four key characters – a mother, father, daughter and son – and an array of peripheral characters.

Each is created with clarity and perfect intonation, the personalities all distinct. The mother is steeped in Carribean tradition, dad is a man of few words, the sister is bright, funny, unfulfilled by her boring job with her colleagues “chatting their shit”, and the son is a teenager, skirting around the edges of getting into trouble. It is easy to become completely engrossed and convinced by the dialogue between them.

The series of beautifully observed relationships transform dramatically into a tragedy, when the son is killed in a gang attack.

And this is what lets the play down. Although the tragic climax is powerful, it occurs too early and Marshall has to maintain the grief and pain for too long. The authentic detailed observations of the characters are replaced with wider brushstrokes, descriptions of mourning around the scene of the crime, the policemen breaking the news, viewing the dead body. There is a danger of reaching saturation point with tragedy, where the audience becomes overwhelmed rather than empathetic.

Most of all, the death is narrated only by the sister and I missed the lightness and technical brilliance of the first half, where Marshall switched between characters.

Random is funny, lyrical, moving and dominated by a startlingly good performance by Marshall. But if the tragic climax had come just a bit later, and Tucker Green had reintroduced some of the deftness from the first scenes, the play would have gone from brilliant into unmissable.