Colder Than Here
Evening Standard, 9th February 2005, Matthew Sweet
Laura Wade’s melancholy comedy stars Margot Leicester , a middle-class woman with
six months to live. You can tell she’s got six months to live because every time
she reappears on stage, her hair is tied a little more tightly. You can tell she’s
middle-class because she has a house in Leamington Spa, a chartered surveyor husband
(Michael Pennington), two daughters (Georgia Mackenzie and Anna Madeley), a cat named
after a Tolkien character and a strong yen for a biodegradable coffin.
Once Myra has given a jolly PowerPoint presentation on her funeral plans, ‘Colder
Than Here’ gets down to business, offering death as a cure for emotional reticence,
sisterly discord – and even a moribund marital sex life.
The dialogue is frequently witty and mostly plausible – with the gruesome exception
of a scene in which Mackenzie is obliged to explain her state of mind with an epic
simile about walking upstairs with an armful of washing. And the performances are
deftly done: Pennington makes smart work of a speech in which he explains his family’s
predicament to a call-centre worker on the end of the phone.
But the play itself, despite the presence of death, love and sex, is disappointingly
weightless. Something better suited, perhaps, to an afternoon on Radio Four than
a night out at the Soho Theatre – and listened to, quietly, at home.
The Times, 11th February 2005, Ian Johns
With its spry wit, mellow mood and middle-class milieu, Laura Wade’s dialogue-driven
new play could easily be seen as better suited to an afternoon drama slot after ‘The
Archers’. But if you shut your eyes, you’d miss the poignant moments of physical
contact that infuse the gentle, melancholy humour of the play.
Without sentimentality or melodrama, ‘Colder Than Here’ evokes the tension and heartache
of a family facing up to the imminent death of a loved one. Myra Bradley (Margot
Leicester) has only six months to live but she’s keeping busy by arranging a biodegradable,
woodland burial for herself.
Without realising it, her efforts to make her departure as trouble-free as possible
– backed up by an amusing PowerPoint presentation – have left her husband and two
grown-up daughters with nothing to do but address their own problems.
Alec (Michael Pennington) is a chartered surveyor so self-contained that he can’t
even listen to his beloved Brahms if other people are in the room. Jenna (Anna Madeley)
is the needy daughter with constant boyfriend problems and a bulimic past. Married
Harriet (Georgia Mackenzie) is her older, self-assured sister, slowly cracking under
the strain of seeing her mother, the glue of the family, weakening while her cardboard
coffin comes to dominate the living room.
Wade can make telling points through seemingly inconsequential details. With Myra
no longer doing the shopping, buying the wrong cat food has led to the family pet
doing a runner. It only takes Alec to say “I can’t really do problems” to sum up
a life of emotional reticence and indecisiveness.
Naomi Wilkinson’s set, raised above real soil, is a curious mixture of house and
parkland with trees sprouting by the sofa and record player. But a sense of growth
is appropriate as the play shows how Alec and Myra start to bridge the gap in a marriage
of separate beds and Jenna matures into what one suspects will be the emotional rock
of the family.
The performances are beautifully pitched in Abigail Morris’s production. Leicester
is a frail but still wilful presence, Mackenzie freezes before our eyes and Madeley’s
clenched body language loosens up as she sorts her life out. Pennington makes a phone
call to get the long-broken boiler fixed a heartbreaking monologue as Alex’s suppressed
pain seeps into his frustration.
This is a low-key drama that some may feel is dramatically underwhelming, with no
profound insights. But it’s still a deft exploration of family dynamics – and without
a single shouting match. With another play opening this month at the Royal Court,
Wade is clearly a playwright on the rise.
The Guardian, 12th February 2005, Brian Logan
Myra has bone cancer; she has been given about six months to live. Her family would
prefer not to think about it – but the subject is hard to avoid when mum turns her
funeral plans into a PowerPoint presentation. There may be a burial afoot, but if
Myra has her way, it won’t be of heads in the sand.
Laura Wade’s play is set in the limbo between the death sentence and the death itself.
How does the knowledge of one’s imminent demise, or that of a loved one, affect the
living of one’s life? Myra (Margot Leicester) spends her last days dictating how
her absence should be coped with. She buys the cardboard coffin and counsels husband
Alec on his love life. Daughter Jenna practises withholding confidences from mum,
a rehearsal of bereavement. Alec focuses on fixing the boiler, because “the least
he can do is let her die in the warm”.
In Abigail Morris’s production, Wade’s treatment of this domesticated death is low-key,
reflective and funereal of pace. Myra’s resignation casts a pall over proceedings;
I would have welcomed a flash of rage against the dying of the light. But Wade makes
no concessions to drama. She is faithful to the mundane passage of everyday life,
as the family soldier on and Myra’s time runs out.
On occasion, ‘Colder Than Here’ feels too literal, like an inventory of the emotional,
and sometimes biological, processes surrounding death. But it’s leavened by wit and
no little wisdom. I loved Alec’s excuse for paying so little attention to his dying
wife: “A watched pot never boils.” And Wade is strong on the way that death (if only
temporarily) makes us re-evaluate life. It pierces the heart to see Michael Pennington’s
Alec plant a hesitant kiss – his first for how many years? – on his wife’s forehead.
His is one of four sound performances in a play that, far from flinching in the face
of death, explores how we might make peace with it.
The Sunday Times, 13th February 2005, John Peter
Laura Wade’s play is a 90-minute masterpiece, a jewel, dark but translucent. It is
a play of love, death and grief: the grief that is hardest to bear, because it begins
before the loved one dies. Myra (Margot Leicester) is dying of bone cancer, and she
is organising her funeral: burial in woodland, a cardboard coffin decorated with
stars, a cushion inside. Oh, and she wants to lie on her side, the way she does when
she sleeps. Her husband, Alec (Michael Pennington), is in the greatest pain, because
he can’t cope with, still less express, emotion; and Pennington’s face, puckered
with grief, terror and loneliness, is an unforgettable study in isolation. He and
Leicester are giving the greatest performances of their distinguished careers; great
in their simplicity and their sense of complete understanding. The actors are so
steeped in the body and soul of their roles that their acting seems to be beyond
technique. There are two daughters – Jenna (Anna Madeley), the difficult, troubled
one, and Harriet (Georgia Mackenzie), the organised, competent one – and Myra grieves
for them both. This is a time when everything hurts, whatever you so, say, think
or feel. Brahms is Alec’s favourite composer, and his chamber music, all aching warmth,
plays between scenes: the perfect accompaniment to Abigail Morris’s delicate but
ruthlessly precise production, and to this moving, funny, brave and beautiful play.
Metro, 14th February 2005, Maxie Szalwinsaka
There’s nothing chilly about ‘Colder Than Here’: humour keeps breaking through the
cloud that hangs over the play. Myra has six months to live. She has bone cancer
and, with the reluctant help of her husband and two grown-up daughters, she is planning
the perfect funeral.
As the four of them chat, bicker and debate which woodland site Myra should be buried
in Laura Wade gives us a portrait of a family facing change and loss. According to
Myra, dying is “easier if you find the funny side”. Wade does find it, thought her
drama is a shade too reasonable about grief. Occasionally we feel as if we’ve been
here before. The family house has structural problems and a broken boiler: this is
‘Truly Madly Deeply’ territory. But Wade brings her characters to life and explores
how family members take it in turns at losing and holding it together.
Before you know it, Abigail Morris’s set is pleasingly autumnal. And Margot Leicester
gives a lovely performance as Myra.
Time Out, 16th-23rd February 2005, Rachel Halliburton
To say that Laura Wade’s drama puts the fun into funeral is to belie the teasing
subtlety of its humour. As Complicite’s ‘A Minute Too Late’ at the National Theatre
proves, death is a fertile ground for several kinds of laughter, and Wade gently
uses her wit to probe the fragile structure of a family braced for grief.
Margot Leicester plays Myra, the mother and family linchpin whose diagnosis with
terminal bone cancer has led to some rebellious reflections on how she wants to organise
her death. A computer program proclaims with a fanfare her decision to have a decorated
cardboard coffin, and throughout her decline she displays a Machiavellian skill in
trying to teach her husband and two daughters how to continue communicating after
she has gone.
True, there have been more bizarre approaches to death, documented both in Jessica
Mitford’s ‘The American Way of Death’ and in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘The Loved One’. But
Wade’s skill is in showing the way Myra’s impending death radically remodels the
identities of those who love her. Anna Madeley’s spicily insecure Jenna suddenly
reveals herself as the emotionally strong member of the family, while Georgia Mackenzie’s
brusque, efficient Harriet is forced to acknowledge the cracks in her psychological
armour.
Occasionally, repetitiveness or an over-laboured metaphor weakens the play. However
– and I write this as someone who has just lost a parent to cancer – it is a perceptive,
refreshing approach to a painful and complex subject.
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