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| You are here > creatives > Matt Aston > Smile |
| Smile * Premiere by Stephen Lowe Directed by Matt Aston Lakeside Arts Centre / New Perspectives Th Co May 2008 A photo to die for... The
end of the pier. A
war photographer’s hiding place. |
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| Nottingham
Evening Post This intelligent new piece from Stephen Lowe, a two-hander and a thriller, is utterly different from his new Brian Clough play, The Devil's League, currently awaiting performance; but it shares with it that thing called excellence. In a seaside photographer's cluttered studio the proprietor (Deborah, played by Tanya Myers), is at work, drinking. A stranger (Jan, played by Daniel Copeland) comes in wanting a picture. He has a foreign accent and poor English. It soon becomes clear that Deborah was once a famous photographer in a war zone, but now prefers anonymity. Arguably Myers is too attractive for her part (only arguably - a lot of female war photographers seem to be glamorous), but she captures the hard nosed seen-it-all cynicism of her character. Her philosophising isn't entirely realistic but this isn't that kind of play. Copeland gives a miraculous performance. He's sad, ordinary, vulnerable, simple-hearted - and menacing - all at the same time. There's some of the feel of the character he played in The Caretaker at the Playhouse in 2006; he even wears an old suit and has problems with his shirt-tail, as he did in that production. The menace in this play comes from Copeland. There's slow development at the start, but to have done it differently would have offended the integrity of the piece. It suddenly hits the spot at a highly dramatic moment. As with all thrillers, you can't give the game away, but there's hope as well as tragedy in this play. [Alan Geary] |
| Metro Stephen Lowe's play reflects on images and the realities they can conceal. Deborah (Tanya Myers) is a burnt-out war photographer who has traded her career for a quiet end-of-the-pier berth, where she pastes together fake postcards for tourists. When Jan (Daniel Copeland) stops by her studio, he asks questions about a photograph of a deserted scene at a cafe in Eastern Europe, one that may be worth killing for. The exchange that follows brings Deborah's erasure of her life's work into a head-on collision with Jan's desire for truth. In Matt Aston's taut production, Jan's puppet show proves to be a more lasting document of real events than Deborah's 'cleansed' photographs. As the characters shed their masks, Smile builds to a gripping conclusion where redemption and terrible violence seem equally possible outcomes. [Wayne Burrows] |
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