Page 262 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

too. If you want to survive socially in our world and not become an outcast, you do whatever it takes.
Though most people don’t go as far as killing, there are people in school, work and social
environments who will either ignore or bully those that aren’t seen to fit in. There might be some
vague feeling that if you do it long enough and hard enough, these people will become ‘normal’. But
in The Drowned World, you’re either ‘normal’ or you’re not.

Director John Haidar has put this together amazingly quickly. The programme notes say the
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production did not exist on 4 January. On 3 March, it appeared on the website of the Guildhall
School of Music and Drama, beautifully-filmed and brilliantly-performed.
The four actors are Guildhall students, though they filmed everything from their homes. The play is
mostly written as a series of monologues with the four characters telling the story between them and
that suits lockdown theatre very well, but there are moments where the characters directly interact.
These moments are all the more powerful because they’re so rare. Most of the time, the interactions
are described by whichever character is narrating that part of the story.

The actors are excellent. Kitty Hawthorne (Tara), Conor McLeod (Darren), Justice Ritchie (Julian) and
particularly Grace Cooper Milton (Kelly) speak their lines meaningfully and compellingly. They were
clearly asked to film their lines from a few different angles and this is really effective. When a
character states what another character has said to them, the angle switches, sharply and suddenly
but in terms of performance, it’s seamless, with one line flowing into the next. The script seems to
give little opportunity for the characters to show personality - personality isn’t valued here and the
characters are focused on other things. But the actors all deliver emotion brilliantly. They can also
shut off their emotions equally well, their eyes suddenly cold, their voices chilling.

The Drowned World is a play that suits the lockdown world perfectly – perhaps even better than it
would suit live theatre. For that reason, I strongly encourage you to watch it while it’s here.