October 23, 2010
Adelaide
Theatre
BRIEF

Blackbird
by David Harrower
Flying Penguin Productions
and Adelaide Festival Centre inSpace Program
Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre.
October 22. Tickets $19.95 – $34.
Bookings at BASS telephone 131246 or bass.net.au
Until October 30.
Award-winning UK playwright David Harrower is well-named – because his 2005 two-hander Blackbird is certainly a harrowing experience. Una (Ksenja Logos), a young woman in her late 20s arrives late in the afternoon at the workplace of Peter (Terence Crawford), a man in his fifties. It is a confrontation, an interrogation, a reckoning – painfully reviving memories of an illicit sexual relationship when she was twelve and he was forty. His name was Ray then and he was imprisoned six years for the offence.
Director David Mealor painstakingly guides the two excellent performers through a series of often unexpected, sometimes (perhaps) implausible twists of emotion and response. Mary Moore’s décor is artfully commonplace and Quentin Grant’s music is sparingly plangent. Blackbird is a difficult, but unforgettable, ninety minutes in the theatre.
Murray Bramwell
The Australian, October 25, 2010