BEETLE GRADUATION - INDEPENDENT WEEKLY REVIEW

by Georgia Gowing

Brink’s latest show is a slightly strange offering. Written as one of a surreal trilogy around the theme of emergence, this two-hander features Carmel Johnson as a mother and Michaela Cantwell her much-criticised daughter.

At 65, the mother is dying and her 40-year-old daughter has come home to care for her out of a sense of obligation. The mother is deeply selfish and has dominated her daughter all her life, calling her Beetle, constantly telling her she is plain and dull and abandoning her with a babysitter when she was seven so she could go on holiday alone. After 40 years of belittlement and emotional neglect, Beetle will finally be free, graduating into adulthood with her mother’s death.

Cantwell and Johnson both give strong performances, working with challenging material: writer Susan Rogers’s words often feel more like poetry than traditional dialogue. As the action flicks back and forth across 35 years, it gives the feeling of floating in time, a mood enhanced by DJ TR!P’s lovely, unobtrusive score and Geoff Cobham’s sea-toned overhead lights. The spare stage design is classic Brink, with little in the way of sets and nothing but a chair and a shawl for props.

For Brink, following on from its spectacular Festival production When The Rain Stops Falling was always going to be a difficult task. But at an hour long and with a cast of two, Beetle Graduation was always meant to be on a different scale – and is all the better for it.