THEATRE REVIEW: Leaves Of Glass - The Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester.

Every once in a while there comes along a piece of theatre so perfectly put together that it becomes a reviewers' nightmare. This evening that rare bird arrived at Manchester's Hope Mill Theatre for a limited run, and it's name.. 'Leaves Of Glass'.

'Leaves Of Glass' is a play by contemporary playwright Philip Ridley, and in this northern premiere of the play directed by Max Harrison, it was just about as perfect a piece of theatre as it is possible to get. Dark, comedic, realistic, thrilling, mysterious, tragic... in fact, put any positive adjective here in this list and it fits. Hence the 'nightmare'....there is nothing to criticise!

Set in the round, and in a very intimate space, with only four black benches and creative sound and lighting to help set each scene, Ridley's writing is tight, superb, and wastes not even one syllable. It tells the story of two brothers; Steven (Ned Costello), the manager of a graffiti removal firm, and his younger more artistic brother, Barry (Joseph Potter). Everything in Steven's life seems to be going fine, despite his unnerving control, until suddenly, things start to fall apart bit by bit as his family start accusing him of things, whether real or imagined. His mother, Liz, (Kacey Ainsworth) starts to question him in ways she has never done before - and he has always been a mummy's boy; whilst his wife, Debbie (Katie Buchholz), believes he has been unfaithful. We learn that the root cause of this is something which happened between the two brothers when they were much younger, and has been left unspoken about for years. It is a play about abuse. Abuse of power, abuse of friendship, and other abuses too terrible to confront... but confront them they must. 

The build in tension is superbly measured, the stage fighting is the most real and convincing I have ever seen, the four cast members are commanding and visceral, the sound, lighting and staging are superb, and we don't even notice that the play lasts 105 minutes without interval. This is a dramatic masterpiece, and just as metal-detector enthusiasts must cast their detection pad over untold hectares until they strike gold, so must reviewers watch hundreds of plays until something like this comes along. Pure theatre.

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 8.7.23