Small and Tired at Belvoir St Theatre

Orestes has come back to bury his father. He has been away a long time. His mother is hardened, his sister is strangely ill. He will see them, he will bury his father and then, in all likelihood, he will drift away again. But in a bar one night, slightly drunk, he meets a gentle soul called Pylades…

Kit Brookman’s Small and Tired sets up a brilliant moral challenge for its characters: to love in spite of all the shit. The play springs from the myth of Orestes and the House of Atreus, but Brookman’s completely disarming leap of imagination has been to fully dissolve the myth into the contemporary world.

The result is a small play which echoes large – about restlessness and modern love, about the rootlessness of the times, about the brokenness of our sense of family and humanity. At its heart is the startling idea that love is an ancient thing we have to learn and re-learn from generation to generation.

Brookman is an associate playwright at Belvoir, and his plays have something special going on: gentle, wise, oddly funny, very human and very smart. He wrote Small and Tired specially for Downstairs, and specially for the remarkable Luke Mullins.

It is beautiful.