The Matchbox
Frank McGuinness
The Matchbox
The ties that bind can never be broken. For Sal, they hang like a noose around her neck, just loose enough to keep a small but potent flame alive inside. A passionate story of love and hate.
4.2 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Location |
Liverpool |
| Venue |
Playhouse Studio |
| Director |
Lia Williams |
| Cast |
Leanne Best |
| From |
June 2012 |
| Until |
July 2012 |
| Box Office |
0151-709 4776 |
| |
The ties that bind can never be broken. For Sal, they hang like a noose around her neck, just loose enough to keep a small but potent flame alive inside. A passionate story of love and hate.
Reviews
The Stage
Natasha Tripney
“McGuinness plausibly depicts the pattern of emotions that follows such a loss - incomprehension followed by a kind of serenity, a willingness to forgive, followed by fury and a thirst for retribution - and he has a way of investing cliches with fresh weight.”
20/06/2012
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The Observer
Kate Kellaway
“... a tour de force – a two-hour monologue – by actress Leanne Best who plays Sal, an Englishwoman of Irish descent.”
24/06/2012
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The Daily Mail
Quentin Letts
“McGuinness’s script is eclipsed by Best’s gigantic yet nuanced performance. For nearly two hours without interval, hair lashed back for action, Best wields the haunted, machete look of a mental patient. Her ironing board physique is draped in a shapeless cotton dress and she thrusts her face into the audience — alternately menacing nervous spectators and engaging them in her pain.”
22/06/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Dominic Cavendish
“It’s rare to find storytelling as sharply and simply involving as this, or to encounter quite such meaty ideas about the place of morality in secular times, or to behold a performance so intricate, measured and powerful. Best often delivers her confessional with unnerving directness at audience members, puncturing the “fourth-wall” in Lia Williams’ meticulously paced production.”
20/06/2012
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The Times
Sam Marlowe
“An unstinting depiction of naked suffering so brutally powerful that it knocks the breath from your body. McGuinness’s writing is both bruisingly intimate and richly epic; in unravelling an appallingly familiar modern catastrophe, it evokes Greek tragedy, Catholicism and political and religious morality, as well as fairytale motifs of wolves and wishes, curses and bloody consequence.”
21/06/2012
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The Guardian
Alfred Hickling
“Best shows Sal stoically negotiating the obligations of modern media bereavement; recalling the manner in which she outflanked the cameras at a press conference by extending an unexpected note of conciliation towards her daughter's killers. But it adds up to a virtuoso portrayal of a woman consumed by incandescent grief. McGuinness has conceived a compelling, tragic heroine.”
24/06/2012
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