Wednesday isn't your light and frothy play. It's not something you'd take a first date to, possibly not any date of any number.
Wednesday is a play that follows 50 minutes in the lives of two men and a woman who's tied to a bed. In the basement. While her abductor sits upstairs and tunes into his weekly dose of Coronation st.
Read the above quick enough and you might think Wednesday is played for laughs. Don't! There's nothing funny about this play and the only laughs to be found are the darkly comic kind that punctuate the gaps between the harrowing gasps of pity from the tied up woman and the brutalised beatings she regularly receives.
It's all justified. It all makes sense. The characters open up in front of the audience, they stay true to the audiences expectations, and even the twists are logically applied to a gripping story that as a bonus has a beginning middle and end.
It has excellent acting, the set, under the arches, claustrophobically dressed, is a gift to the director, but.....
...But at the end, the brutal bitter end of the play (this is one that was never going to have a happy ending) I felt only relief that it was over.
Seeing this type of play is perhaps necessary to remind us what violent people are capable off, and that sometimes they do it for no other reason than they can. But it left me hollow, perhaps because at the end of it I felt as though physical violence had been used as a substitute for character exploration.
Personally I prefer violence that's implied rather than graphically portrayed, here instead I felt like a voyeur on the set of a snuff movie.
Go to see it if you have a strong stomach. Stay well away if you don't.
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