The knives are out …
Daily Mail, 20th
February 2004
There’s a knife and
someone gets their head smashed on a table.
This is the level
of violence in the confrontation between actors Catherine McCormack and Michael
Pennington in Hanif Kureishi’s scorching new play ‘When the Night Begins’.
Director Tony Clark
mediates as he, the actors and I meet in the basement at the sprawling new
Hampstead Theatre in North London.
Actually, I’m not
sure I was meant to mention the knife, but it’s done now. I’m allowed to say it’s
a thriller and Catherine McCormack plays Jane, the young widow of an older,
wealthy film-maker, who visits a squalid flat where Cecil, an older man lives.
I vowed to be
somewhat cryptic about the play’s sensational subject matter, but excerpts of
our conversation might offer some clues. However, you should book tickets at
Hampstead now if you want to know all. Previews start on March 3.
“It’s about how
people interpret the past,” explained Catherine (best known as a film actress,
but, luckily for us, now bewitched by the stage).
Michael added: “We
all have versions of how and why it all happened.”
Catherine ventured:
“Jane’s trying to exorcise the past. She wants to cut this thing out of her
like a cancer and the only way she feels she can do this is to confront him and
find some sort of catharsis.”
Michael told me: “Cecil’s
argument is that she’s blotting out the good that I’ve done her and I’m
blotting out the bad that I’ve done her.”
Catherine said that
Janes’s husband had kept her secure, then he died. “The old ghosts are creeping
back,” she added.
Director Clark
describes the play as “and exercise in tension, as well as dealing with a
rather emotive subject”.
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