AS with Chris Chibnall's Gaffer last autumn, York Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden is encouraging new writing with Adam Canavan's Third Finger, Left Hand, this time in a fruitful partnership between Nine Lives Productions and Richard Jordan Productions.
This two-hander play first emerged in chrysalis form in a rehearsed reading in York, then acquired its butterfly wings at the Edinburgh Fringe and now returns to York fully grown in colours of orange and brown.
Orange and brown? It must be the Seventies, and indeed it is in Adam Canavan's humorous and moving evocation of that grey yet gaudy era, wrapped inside a study of escapism, family feuding and resolution. He writes of the trials and tribulations, the milk teeth and early teenage years, and later the shifting balance of power in the relationship of two Lancashire sisters of Irish stock: his own sisters.
Niamh (Angela Clerkin) is the elder, assured, naughtier one; Grace (Amanda Daniels), is plumper, in her sister's shadow, striving for love and acceptance, in a tale of Grace and the favoured one.
The play opens on Adrian Rees's set of orange carpet and brown boxed furniture with the two sisters in adulthood. They are talking after years of silence, brought on by Grace shouldering all the emotional weight and domestic duties when their mother was dying, but now reunited because Niamh has cancer.
Cast and dialogue alike switch with lan between past and present, happiness and sadness, as Clerkin and Daniels take on children's voices, expressions and mannerisms with impressive interplay, typified by their re-enactment of delirious horseplay.
The play's title comes from a Northern Soul classic, Martha Reeves's version of Third Finger, Left Hand, and music and dancing, be it Thursday night's Top Of The Pops or the Wigan Casino, provide an escape from the beatings liberally administered by the sisters' abusive Irish father, almost always to Grace. The brutality is all the more raw for seeing only the victim.
Sonia Fraser's production is studio theatre at its best, so close up and personal yet universal, with Daniels and Clerkin's performances being as impassioned as Canavan's piercing writing. No excuses, see it.
Box office: 01904 623568.
Updated: 10:54 Wednesday, May 18, 2005
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