Cavendish, Dominic (10 May 2007). "Haunted by a painful past". The Telegraph . Retrieved 24 October 2018. The four-hander comes to life after a few initial hiccups. With the characters being quite hedgehog-like, Harrison places the story on a tonal swing, heightening the comic exchanges to mitigate the bleakness that surrounds them. Joseph Potter's Barry starts off a bit overdone and overly jumpy against Ned Costello's poised approach as Steven. He is waspish and artificial until he eases into the role and finally delivers a coup that makes all the dominoes cascade around him. On the other side, Costello gives a refined, bitter performance. He is increasingly haunted as his resentment resurfaces, straying from sibling rivalry and tipping into needless childish cruelty. Exploiting the intimacy of the smaller auditoria at the Park Theatre, set designer Kit Hinchcliffe has created a perfect setting by which to underscore the menace that lies at the centre of Leaves of Glass. Set in the round, the four actors move in and out of the dark performance space which is marked only by inlaid floor lighting. Their proximity to the audience both when performing, and when entering and leaving, reinforces the claustrophobia of a family environment, creating a distinct sense of unease. Sometimes, very rarely, you witness something that transcends words, lives in its own universe, and has no sense of comparison to anything that went before or is likely to come after. It becomes your story to try and relay because you were the one that observed it. No one else saw what you saw. It was intimately revealed to you, and to you alone. Leaves Of Glass at Hope Mill Theatre has pulled me into this mystical web of confusion, for I now have the challenge of unravelling the very real sensation that I was watching four actual people, and not four actors perform a play. Their truths, their lies, their realities, their distorted and fractured manifestations were presented with such authenticity that it became real. And I was eavesdropping on their intensely private family secrets. That’s the way it works in this family. Believe what you wanna believe. Twist this. Ignore the other. That’s how we survive.’

The four actors, Kacey Ainsworth, Katie Buchholz, Ned Costello, and Joseph Potter, navigate the shifts and switches of Ridley’s text with compelling grace, presenting the unreliability of their characters with ease, snapping out the brisk dialogue so clearly that the nearly two hours of playing time flash by. All four find some unexpected but very welcome laughs, and drive home the corkscrewing plot lines to excellent effect. Particular credit goes to Ned Costello, tracing a character arc that starts as the personification of straightforward brotherly love, and gets steadily darker and less trustworthy as the story progresses. Max Harrison’s direction is clear and unfussy, the stagecraft on display is admirable, the lighting is very effective and the intimacy of the studio brings the audience closer to the heart of this masterpiece of gaslighting than it may want to be. The cast, however, is first-rate. Debbie, I felt, was an underwritten character, although Buchholz does brilliantly to make what could easily have been a one-dimensional, nice-but-dim personality into someone altogether more substantial. Costello’s Steven has good stage presence, which is just as well given his various soliloquies. Potter came across as someone relishing playing the complicated and somewhat flamboyant Barry. Ainsworth’s Liz was highly convincing, unapologetically forthright when the occasion calls for it but otherwise possessing a warm and welcoming charm. The major theme throughout the production is memory, how what we remember can differ from the truth, and how sometimes we choose to remember things differently as it’s less painful; the show begs the question – can we trust our memories? And whose narrative do we, the audience, trust? Unsettling, opening up topics audiences prefer to shy away from, that’s a function of theatre too. Ridley does it supremely well. He writes plays that delight in keeping the audience unbalanced, and this play is a fine example of that, juggling truth in a succession of sharp, focussed scenes that leave us with fewer certainties than we started with. It doesn’t make for a comfortable evening’s entertainment, but it is arguably more important because of it. And this production gives a superb platform for all that squiggly doubt. The real triumph of Leaves of Glass is its ability to draw the audience into the very heart of its narrative. There’s no stage, per se, just a designated acting area that invites the audience to become part of the story. The proximity to the performers and the intensity of their emotions lends an air of voyeuristic discomfort as the audience is made privy to raw, private conflicts about depression, guilt, and regret. The drama is punctuated by shouting and brawling, heightening the sense of unease and making the audience feel as though they are not mere spectators, but complicit in the unfolding events.

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Ridley’s script spends far too much time setting up the story, it takes too long for the audience to connect to the characters, which for the first half feel one-dimensional. Quite a lot of time passes before we realise there’s anything under the surface of them. For this reason, the suspense and drama built plateaus in the middle, as nothing much has occurred, I can see that having an interval may have caused audience members to not return. Max Harrison’s production is weighty and intense, there are minimal moments of light peppered throughout, and this at times means the play is excruciating to watch – not in a bad way – the tension is simply enough to place you on the edge of your seat and disable your ability to exhale. To have the climax of the play, occur in complete darkness, except for a candelabra, surrounds the audience in heavy darkness, which makes the scene atmospheric, Harrison makes us sit in the drama of this scene for a while, creating a truly remarkable moment within the play.

They're joined by a stunning Kacey Ainsworth as the fierce matriarch of the emotionally repressed clan. A headstrong mother with unhealthy methods of self-preservation, she refers to her child's bouts of violence (or alcoholism, it's unclear) as a "fluey bug thing". The same virus used to affect her husband, whom she'd banish to the shed and who would do despicable, unmentionable things to Steven in the seclusion of the place. The catalyst comes in the shape of Debbie, Steven's wife. Ridley entrusts her with relieving the tension for most of it, but hides a deeper significance in her presence. Katie Buchholz brings bona fide sit-com timing to the humorous scenes, but turns into the key to the family's emotional circumvention and inability to communicate smoothly. The play was commissioned and directed by Lisa Goldman after being greatly impressed by Ridley's previous adult stage play Mercury Fur. [2] The production was Lisa Goldman's first in her tenure as artistic director of the Soho Theatre. [3] Like Mercury Fur the play starred Ben Whishaw in its premiere production. [4] Steven, played outstandingly by Ned Costello, is the eldest of the two brothers. The strongest of the four performances, there is a constant edge to him. It feels as if he is holding something in: like a caged animal, there’s unspent energy, barely controlled but just beneath the surface waiting to erupt. He’s the eldest by 5 years and has kept the family together throughout previous trauma. The inference is that when he divulges his stories and reminiscences, they’re accurate, and therefore to be believed. By contrast, his younger brother Barry is volatile and troublesome. A recovering alcoholic, his anxiety and mental health issues suggest an unreliability of memory. In another strong performance Joseph Potter encapsulates that volatility of mental health, physically leaping about the stage, at times harming himself and potentially others, he is always on the edge of extremes: delirious with potential and excitement or in the depths of anguish. The relationship between the two brothers is perfectly on point: a fraternal co-dependence which facilitates both support and jealousy. The scene changes are sufficiently swift, with the set mostly consisting of benches that get shifted around – occasionally, a table will appear. The only props visible are the ones essential to advance the narrative. Otherwise, it is largely left to the dialogue to establish time and place: we know Liz’s house doesn’t have double glazing, for instance, because it is suggested she gets it installed. But that turns out to be a relatively minor concern – the show’s critical incident has already happened before the point at which the play begins, with some of the more eccentric and left-field behaviour arguably being exhibited as irrational responses to the death of their father considerably before his time. Leaves of Glass will run at Park Theatre, London from 11 May – 3 June. It will then play at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford (15 – 17 June) and Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre (10 – 16 July).Leaves of Glass is a vivid, unsettling drama that brilliantly captures the essence of domestic life, bristling with conflict, tension, and uneasy revelations. Penned by acclaimed playwright Philip Ridley and under the masterful direction of Max Harrison, this play is a formidable examination of family bonds, personal frailty, and the profound implications of the past that bleed into the present. the initial draft perhaps was sort of more real-time, one location. [...] I love doing that, I mean, I think that's what theatre does best and... It always amazes me that people are surprised that I should be drawn to that kind of form of telling a play because that's one of the things that theatre does so well, is real-time. Where else can you experience that? Certainly not in film now. But then what happened was that I really got into this idea of — which is what the play has ended up doing — of sort of like coming into scenes at very jagged angles. [In the play] you get kind of like layers of these scenes, like kind of little pieces of broken glass that come in. The scenes begin when they are already up and moving; the action is already happening and they don't kind of finish on a kind of particular comforting way; there is no kind of dying fall at the end. You're just in and out of these scenes almost like cinematic cuts. [...] And I quite liked that kind of oblique way of telling of what is, in a way, a very oblique story. I thought that was part of the theatrical experience for me of this kind of [...] circular descent that [the character of] Steve is on of memory and morality." [7] Notable productions [ edit ]

During the course of the play, we see their interactions with each other and their two significant others, Steven’s wife, Debbie (Katie Buchholz) and their mother (Kacey Ainsworth), as a series of snapshots of their lives. Time passes in short bursts, each one charged with unspoken secrets. Both Katie Buchholz and Kacey Ainsworth play their parts with unspoken depth conveyed in glances and body language which makes the audience wonder what they actually know.

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The death of their father has clearly affected the brothers, and their relationship with not only each other, but also their mother Liz, a straight talking East End woman who is convinced she’s holding the family together, when in reality she’s ignoring what’s painfully obvious to the rest of us. Kacey Ainsworth’s gloriously forthright performance leaves the audience wondering whether to love or hate this particular matriarch.

Director Max Harrison's lean revival punches well above its weight. Catch it while you can’Daily Express

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The four-person ensemble, comprised of Kacey Ainsworth, Katie Bucholz, Ned Costello, and Joseph Potter, delivers a tour de force performance. The setting, East London, 2023, is the canvas on which their characters unfurl – the hardworking Steven, the unsettled Barry, the lonely Liz, and the disillusioned Debbie.