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The Jewish Chronicle

Review: Earthquakes In London

Apocalypse you can enjoy

August 12, 2010 10:11
Earthquakes in London, an exhilarating drama of a disintegrating family living in a disintegrating city

By

John Nathan,

John Nathan

1 min read

You can pick holes, but what is the point? You could bang on about how a play which puts so much energy into getting us to think seriously about the science of climate change, uses some pretty dodgy science itself.

But Mike Bartlett's time-vaulting epic (the action begins in 1968 and ends in 2026) is so exhilarating; and director Rupert Goold serves up its complexities with such bravura; and Miriam Buether's design - the Cottesloe has been reconfigured into a nightclub with a catwalk stage snaking through the audience - is so audacious, only the mealiest mouth would moan.

Bartlett burst onto the scene in 2007 with an open wound of a play in which estranged parents fought for custody of their child. Here the dysfunctional family - focusing on three sisters - is living on a malfunctioning planet.

The title is not a metaphor. Sinking glaciers have slammed into tectonic plates and an earthquake in London is predicted. And there is a fissure in the sisters' family too. Their emotionally distant father, Robert (Bill Paterson), is a widower and maverick environmentalist who has predicted the coming apocalypse. His unloved daughters were always an unwelcome distraction from his research.