"The Long Road" by Shelagh Stephenson (14-15 Aug, 19-24 Aug 2019)

Two preview shows in London and then on to the Edinburgh Fringe for our first visit.

Poster

“After the incredible response to our award-winning production of this powerful play, we are reprising it for two performances only, prior to taking it to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The play’s forceful and empathetic look at a family in crisis after a knife-crime death also looks at the redemptive possibilities of restorative justice — whether victims and even perpetrators of crime can somehow benefit from meeting each other, and their journeys down the long road towards peace.

For these two shows, we’ll be inviting special guests to discuss the issues after each performance.”

Director – Paul Smith
19-24 August, The Space@Surgeon's Hall, Edinburgh

Trailer
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Radio Interview
​(Listen)

What They Said
​(Read)
Dan, a teenage boy, goes out in the evening with his older brother Joe. There is a small altercation with a young woman outside a shop, she stabs Dan and he dies quickly on the pavement, his brother Joe leaning over him.”The Long Road” opens with Joe’s dazed but graphic description of those events and calls the audience to attention with a ferocity that continues throughout Shelagh Stephenson’s sharply written play.
 
Over the course of the next eighty minutes, on a small set, efficiently lit and furnished with minimum scenery and props, five characters deal with the effects of this event. Dan’s grieving family veer off in different directions: his mother Mary struggles to understand; his father John wrestles with rage and distracts himself with running and then with alcohol. Dan’s brother Joe wonders whether he alone can be enough for his parents since Dan, he believes, was their favourite. Eventually Mary decides she wants to meet her son’s murderer and with the help of a counsellor she begins that process despite John’s objections.
 
Shelagh Stephenson’s writing is pared down to the essential, it’s highly focussed with small details used to great effect. Elizabeth Ollier’s Mary describes the indentations of her late son’s feet in his shoes and says that she has told a university that he’ll be taking up the offer they made him. She’s not deluded, she’s pragmatic while lost in grief and all the more affecting because of it.
 
Alistair Dewar’s John is a man well on the road to self-destruction until brought up sharply by his own actions. Dewar plays him as a human being, not always sympathetic in his rage, but still recognisable as ‘one of us’.
 
Louis Bricusse as the older son and now the only child, skilfully portrays the confusion of a young man burdened with guilt and grief and without the life experience to bolster him.
 
Fleur de Henrie Pearce is striking as the badly damaged Emma, Dan’s murderer, with a beautifully observed and crafted performance. This character’s constantly hyped, constantly moving, defensive-aggressive demeanour is a human powder keg, a woman to whom nothing has been given and from whom an awful lot has been taken. She’s the woman you walk through the train carriage to avoid
 
Into this festering mix, Elizabeth the psychologist arrives to take Mary and Emma possibly towards some sort of restorative justice. Leonia Chesterfield gives a suitably restrained performance as Elizabeth, again with attention to the small details, her momentary loss of control during her challenging interactions with Emma being highly effective because of its brevity.
 
Though Emma’s dramatic trajectory is perhaps ultimately predictable and the play’s resolution a little too neat, this is not real life; it’s drama, and an exploration of the possible, so all bets are off and we are allowed to appreciate a little light at the end of a dark tunnel.
 
St Michael’s Players is high definition drama which ticks every box. Director and actors are completely in tune with their material and the material they have is high quality. My only disappointment was olive-related. The ‘olives exchange’ between various characters was a moment of gentle relief. I suspect there were others or rather I’m dimly aware that there were others but they weren’t as apparent as they could be. Humour is always present around death, however awful, and a peppering of it through the drama breaks the relentlessness and rounds the characters. That aside, this is an excellent piece of theatre very well presented. Highly recommended.
 
Eleanor Lewis (August 2019) (https://markaspen.com/)
The Long Road by Shelagh Stephenson is all about forgiveness – how you deal with the unimaginable, how you start along the 'long road' to reconciliation, whether that is reconciling with your family, a victim, a perpetrator or simply yourself. Imagine an ordinary family of four, a mother, father and two brothers and then someone murders the youngest son, 18-year-old Danny.

"I want to understand," says Mary, Danny's mother as she tries to begin to come to terms with losing a son, a random stab victim of a girl out of her head on coke. This play is about all the family having to come to a point where they begin to move on from their grief, which is trapping them as much as the perpetrator, Emma, who is now trapped within a prison's walls.

The show premiered at the Soho Theatre in 2008 and was created from real-life stories of victims and perpetrators of crime, by Shelagh Stephenson and people from The Forgiveness Project and Synergy Theatre, a company which works with prisoners and ex-prisoners aiming for their eventual rehabilitation.

The play is a series of monologues and vignettes that gradually create a picture for the audience of what the characters were like before the moment of Danny’s death and how they react individually and corporately after his death.

St Michael’s Players are reviving this production from last year for two nights before heading off to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The play lends itself to a small intimate space and worked well performed on the floor of a church hall set into a corner. The packed venue helped to add to the feeling of claustrophobia that the family suffer as they try to come to terms with their grief.

The initial series of monologues show Mary, the mother, (Elizabeth Ollier) recalling the number of days Danny has lived; Joe, the brother, (Louis Bricusse), regretting the fact he’d stopped to buy cigarette papers and John, the father, (Alastair Dewar) describing his need to run, pounding his grief into the pavements and of course Danny, always present in the urn at the side of the stage.

The character of the mother is key to driving the story as she spots Emma, (Fleur de Henrie Pearce) the girl who has committed the murder in a newspaper article. She is trying to make sense of the fact that Danny is dead while Emma is still alive. Elizabeth Ollier captures the immense grief in a performance that shows the tightly controlled anquish of a mother who struggles to comprehend how one moment she has a son and the next moment he is gone. Her powerful description of thinking about sprinkling his ashes on her muesli to return him to where he came from is delivered with a feeling of melancholy that contrasts with her sudden outbursts of uncontrolled anger where she describes the different ways she might kill Emma Price.

Alastair Dewar as the father struggles to put his feelings into words – he abandons running to hide in a bottle. I would have liked slightly more variation in his delivery. The pent-up anger is evident, but a more gradual move from frustration to anger would have given the character a little more depth. Nonetheless his performance shows clearly the damaging rage that Danny’s murder has called up and which is tearing the family apart.

Louis Bricusse as Joe gives a strong, credible performance, showing his frustration with his parents and his own feelings of inadequacy and resentment as he believes his family feel the wrong son has died.

Leonia Chesterfield, is the prison visitor, Elizabeth, who mediates between the family and Emma. Played with a reserved, calm a little more reaction to some of the foul language and abuse thrown at her, with perhaps a wider variety of pace in her line delivery could have added another level to this character, but it is a strong performance nonetheless that benefited from not being over sentimental about the difficult childhood of a murderer.

The hardest part to play is probably Emma, herself. It is difficult to create sympathy for someone who has caused the raw grief that we are forced to face from the outset. As snippets of information about her past come to light we are shown a dysfunctional, cynical, bitter young woman who hides her inadequacies behind bravado and foul language. The gradual appearance of a damaged, illiterate teenager who actually regrets her crime is subtly presented by Fleur de Henrie Pierce throughout the course of this 80-minute piece.

Although some of the later scenes lack development, and leave the audience frustrated at not seeing more of the characters' interaction, this is a fault of the play rather than the acting. At this time, when knife-crime is so prevalent and seems to hit the headlines every day, this play is modern, contemporary and very relevant.

Catch it at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from the 19th – 24th of August.
Caroline Jenner (Sardines review) (link)
Chiswick’s long-standing amateur drama group performed one of their two Edinburgh Preview shows at the St Michael’s Centre on Elmwood Road on Wednesday, 14 July. 

The play centres around the aftermath of a random act of violence in which 18-year-old Danny was stabbed to death. It explores themes of grief, forgiveness and restorative justice with Danny's family coming face-to-face with his killer, Emma Price. 

Stories of knife crime are in newspapers, on our televisions and on social media, every single day but this play takes a deeper look at the people behind the horrifying statistics. The people who suffer behind the headlines and the consequences of using a knife. 

This production is a superb portrayal of the gut-wrenching and life-changing nature of grief- it’s hard to say whether this was best done through the character’s various monologues or when the family comes together taking their frustrations out on one another. We are taken on their journey of figuring out a ‘new normal’ and life after grief as well as Danny’s mother’s complex attempt at forgiveness. 

It is a testament to both the script and the acting when a play can be at once so hard to watch and yet so engrossing. The actors truly seemed to be at one with their complex characters and with the story. Fleur de Henrie Pearce is believable as a lost young girl who has committed an awful crime which even she can’t seem to come to terms with. The character certainly isn’t one dimensional with the audience’s feelings towards her changing dramatically throughout the course of the play. This is true for all of the characters as their grief manifests itself in different ways. 

The play explores how ‘a moment of madness’ can lead to the death of an innocent teenager as well as the breakdown of a family unit- a family which was once perfect are now struggling to piece themselves back together. 

The set was minimalist with a few meaningful props, a photo of Danny which briefly gets taken out, Danny’s urn and bottles of whiskey. 

Not only did the play give audience members an insight into restorative justice and what it is but a Q&A was held afterwards with people who deal with situations like this almost every day including Sian West, a justice consultant. Restorative justice can bring offenders and victims face-to-face with incredible consequences- the outcomes people seek when taking the restorative justice road are not always the outcomes they get but there is always something. One key element in The Long Road, for instance, is that Emma Price does not once apologise but there is a somewhat positive outcome to their difficult meetings and the character seems to evolve. The situation is never resolved but could something like that ever be truly resolved?

Edinburgh Fringe audiences should certainly mark this down as a must-see- an outstanding true to life exploration of what is unfortunately a regular occurrence in London and elsewhere today.
Aine McGinty, Chiswick Herald (link)
The Long Road tells the story of a family torn apart by their son/brother stabbed to death outside a shop. In order to get closure and answers meeting his killer appears to be the only way forward! But at what emotional cost can the family agree on this!

The themes covered are extremely heartfelt and emotionally provoking. Watching his brother stabbed leaves a lasting memory for Joe his older brother. While trying to make sense of why it happened he has the added disadvantage of trying to understand his parents form of coping as well as they argue and become emotionally worlds apart.

Fleur de Henrie Pearce performance as Emma (murderer) is spellbinding and outstanding. Her portrayal of a young girl high on anxiety and anything else she can find to take or drink completely owns the stage during each of her scenes. Shaking, nervous laughter and angry outbursts. I was entranced by her character all the way through.

All the action during the production takes place around a white table and three chairs. Befitting of the family drama for the ‘normal’ daily family place for meals. I like the use of white as it keeps it clean and calming from all the chaos and trauma spilling out over the rest of the stage.

There is a danger of performing a play written fifteen years ago though. laws change along with the free use of sharing of information. During the play, Elizabeth (prison worker) discloses private conversations held with Emma in prison and it hasn’t sat comfortably with me as the laws in place now have changed. I felt an announcement should be made at the beginning of the performance acknowledging events were correct at the time the play was written.

It is rather a lengthy play for a Fringe production at 80 minutes long. The recommended length of 60 minutes for a play would have made the plot tighter and raised tension higher by not drawing things out quite as long. Overall a very good play and worth taking the time to see.

Four Stars" (link)
​"Searingly powerful, thought-provoking production that explores the complexities of restorative justice in the aftermath of a violent crime. A tight, spartan production, the acting was intense and brilliant: you absolutely felt what it would be like to be in that situation. Must see!"

"Powerful, moving, gripping drama with thought-provoking content and great performances from all five cast members. A must-see at this year's Fringe."

"amazing production. Fast-moving storyline with extremely credible, strong characters and an excellent script. All of the acting was powerful and the team performance together kept our interest throughout. Brilliant performances from all"

"....just had someone come up to me after tonight’s performance and say it’s the best thing he has ever seen at the Fringe!!"

" A wonderful spine chilling performance. The cast understood the problem so well and that helped them to put on a marvellous show. Good luck in Edinburgh!" Vicki N

“Great to get an insight into the variety of thoughts and feelings of all people involved in the situation and their coping strategies. Q&A very important after”

“Excellent. Feel like they could be more ‘trying to hold it together’ before big outbursts of emotion”

“Powerful play, great acting”

“Powerful, grabs you by the throat. Like walking on broken glass”

“Brilliantly written and performed”

“Very poignant production that encapsulates how grief can affect a family in different ways. Makes you question which point of view you would hold. Wonderfully acted”

“The acting was superb — a very powerful production”

“Couldn't see you all actors as someone in front of me”

“Need a stage to see, even in row 2”

“Pity not on stage to better see the wonderful facial expressions. Extremely provocative”

“Thought provoking and insightful”

“Great topic and uplifting that positivity came out of it”

“A difficult subject well tackled. May have been better on a raised stage”

“Very moving. Well done!”

“Dramatic, very intense and moving. Resonated so much with my own experience of bereavement”

“Superb production which made me cry.”

“Compelling story by an inspired cast”

“A harrowing experience of knife crime finds some light at the end of the tunnel”

“Wonderful… acting/direction”

“Very moving”

“You gave some fantastic writing the great and powerful delivery deserved. Everybody had a moment where they just shone, but huge kudos to Fleur for the brilliant and all encompassing understanding of her character”

“Very powerful and thought provoking. Brilliantly, totally against Emma but changed my view”

“Totally awesome!”

“Amazingly powerful and superb acting. A must-see. Should be recorded for use in schools”

“Very powerful and hard-hitting. Strong, moving performances from all the actors. Subject matter of heartbreaking”

“Powerful. Well-acted. Good pace and rhythm. Provided insight (opened my eyes) to what effect and murder can have on a family. What the fight scene was weak in quite clumsy — is it worth doing it in a different way?”

“Could not hear some of the lines. Raised voices sufficiently loud! I found
“Elizabeth's" eye-shadow too prominent at the beginning. It was disconcerting”

“Excellent performances by the whole cast”

“Very powerful and incredibly professional and very much draws you in on the emotional journey with them. Gave me goosebumps”

“Powerful! Excellent performance. Effective. Food for thought”

“Very thought-provoking. Actors need to speak up times”

“Brilliant direction and acting”

Programme
programme_-_the_long_road_eff.pdf
File Size: 535 kb
File Type: pdf
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Pictures

Cast

Danny (Alex Dewar)
Joe (Louis Bricusse)
Mary (Elizabeth Ollier)
John (Alastair Dewar)
Emma (Fleur de Henrie Pearce)
Elizabeth (Leonia Chesterfield)

Crew

Director (Paul Smith)
Assistant Director (Bryony Wilman)
Producer (Fleur de Henrie Pearce)
Lighting Design (James Holmes-Siedle)
Sound Designer (Harry Doyle)
Lighting & Sound Operator (Paul Smith)
Set Design (James Holmes-Siedle)
Publicity and Social Media (Fleur de Henrie Pearce)
Stage Management (Bryony Wilman)
Backstage Assistance (TBC with Bryony)
Front of House and Bar (Members & Friends of St Michael’s Players)