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Well, with tweedy Scots ladies incanting “Grief is a guest that takes over your home and will not leave”, and saying things such as “I had rather spend my life with bricks on my back than carry the memories I have of that day”, the danger is of ending up with an embarrassing if well-meant spoof. But that doesn’t happen, thanks to some intense acting, a moving ending and the built-in seriousness of the event that the women are mourning.
What especially struck Brevoort was the Scots women’s determination to perform an act of cleansing akin to an Ancient Greek ritual. They wanted to get hold of the blood-stained clothes of the passengers on Pan Am 103, wash them, and return them to their families. I don’t know if their efforts were resisted by a Mr Jones from the US State Department, as is the case in The Women of Lockerbie; but it’s the conflict between this modern Pentheus and women at a seventh-anniversary service that gives the play half its tension. The other half comes from a figure seemingly based on a stricken Euripidean heroine. Lisa Eichhorn’s Madeline Livingston, a New Jersey woman, lost her 20-year-old son in the crash and has not stopped sobbing since. She runs from the memorial service and up into the hills where the play is set, searching for a body that was never found and ignoring John Hudson as her exhausted husband and Colette O’Neil as a doughty Scot who lost her husband and daughter when bits of plane hit her house.
The play touches on politics — O’Neil has 30 seconds of rage against alleged provocations of Globocop — but is more concerned with matters seldom aired in the theatre nowadays. What is mischance, what is fate? How to reconcile profound grief with belief in God? How to exorcise a great evil? The answer of the Lockerbie women, as of Brevoort, was to “get love out of this”. Can’t think of a better one myself.
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