The Sunset Limited

7 PM, Corpus Playroom, April 22nd-26th, £6/5.

This intense play is all about faith, reason, and learning. There are only two characters named ‘Black’, an evangelical Christian former convict, and ‘White’, an atheistic professor whom Black saves from suicide. The whole performance takes place in Black’s sparsely-decorated tenement over the course of an unclear period of time.

The most important thing in a play like this is that the two leads have some sort of chemistry, and, fortunately, both are well-acted. James Dobbyn as Black has an appropriately congenial and spiritual air about him which makes the play’s final scene after White leaves the apartment all the more successful, as these traits are finally worn down.  David Matthews as White did a good job, too, creating exactly the prickly sense of insecurity the roll calls for. The two actors swap stories and arguments with a natural ease which exposes the startling differences between their characters’ worldviews and upbringings.  At the same time—and this may well be the fault of the script—both characters feel a bit one-dimensional: considering their names, this may be the point, but it does not change the fact that the whole audience was probably a little tired of both character’s affectations by the end of the play. On the other hand, the dialogues are pretty well-written, managing to avoid the more clichéd arguments of both sides.

With this in mind it is a shame that there were clearly some opening-night issues, with both actors occasionally seeming to skip sections, or lose their place in the script. At times it seemed like the performance would be a good object of some sort of drinking game in which the audience downs one every time White says that he ‘really must leave’ or Black replies with something to the effect of ‘no, stay’. It isn’t clear if the rather repetitive bridging dialogue between meatier sections is the fault of the script or first-night nerves, but either way it makes for a slightly wearying performance.

The production was, at least, slick enough to overcome any slightly fumbled sections, with the simple set doing well to support the two actors’ chemistry—my favourite touch being the presence of a third chair in a play with a cast of two, which is clearly supposed to represent, depending on which character you side with, the either blatant absence or lingering presence of God in the play.

This performance gets the most important things right. Where there are problems, they seem to be down to either a slightly too intense and wearisome script or some opening-night nerves on the actors’ part. Coming from a seemingly first-time student director, it’s a good show.