BWW Reviews: SOMEONE WHO'LL WATCH OVER ME, Southwark Playhouse, April 23 2012

Theatres have something in common with sites of incarceration – audiences are held in a space, usually denied the opportunity to eat or drink and must ask for leave to use the lavatories. There, of course, the analogy ends, as is movingly illustrated in Frank McGuiness’ Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (at Southwark Playhouse until 12 May).

Three men sit in a room (“Not a cell – we are not prisoners”) and deal with the condition of being a hostage: the fear of losing one’s mind, the fear of losing one’s life; the fear of losing one’s soul. Edward (Billy Carter) is loud, loquacious and lonely; Adam (Joe Timms) is young, sensitive and spiritual; and Michael (Robin Soans) is posh, professional and pissed off. As the men talk, the initial impression of them being simply too caricatured as Irish, American and English respectively, gives way to an understanding that these men’s extraordinary situation has not displaced their ordinary hopes and, yes, ordinary fears – they are concerned about their families, the mistakes they’ve made that they suspect they will never be able to rectify and what others think about them. We care about the three not just because of they are hostages, but because they are people like us.

“Laugh, you bastard, laugh. Don’t cry – they’ve won then.” Edward’s instruction to Michael is supported by the humour that ebbs and flows around the room, not just in the usual locker-room banter in which all men in confined spaces indulge, but in extraordinary flights of fancy in which films are re-enacted, rabbits (or are they kangaroos) hop about and Virginia Wade wins Wimbledon again. The three actors excel in these scenes, but they also do the distress well too, never more so than when Billy Carter and Robin Soans take their cue from the Spartans to mark their status as warriors, albeit warriors whose weapons are love and respect, not guns and chains.    

The play invites us to consider what these men (what man really) can do when life becomes a calculus of fears and nothing else. And its answer is that one must become more human, not less, to survive – a message that lifts the spirits and satisfies one’s soul. In the twenty years since this play was written, Beirut may have become a little more safe, but the Middle East still bleeds with the blood of innocents – the answer to its problems surely lie in more humanity and less inhumanity, as the play said a generation ago. Will the next generation take heed?

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