South London is generously laden with local theatre spaces under railway arches with Union Street’s Cervantes Theatre specialising in works from Spanish playwrights. This month we have a new play, The Island, written by Juan Carlos Rubio and translated into English by Tim Gutteridge getting a four-week run, writes Christopher Peacock.
The Island is a tale of Ada and Laura, a lesbian Spanish couple in a hospital waiting room awaiting the fate of their son who is in theatre receiving treatment after a devastating accident. Rubio’s script slowly drip-feeds us more and more backstory so that we get a fuller picture of this couple’s relationship and what has led them to this anxious wait. It’s a study of the couple’s relationship, picking apart the tensions that stem from being in a non-traditional Spanish relationship along with raising a child that has multiple additional needs. As the layers are pared back we learn of infidelity within the relationship and, although they may have seemed like a strong unit battling against the world together, the holes appear.
Jessica Lazar’s direction does a solid job of preventing this from being a rather static duologue stuck on uncomfortable waiting room chairs. Rebecca Banatvala as Laura has less of the emotional breadth to work with compared to Rebecca Crankshaw’s Ada but both work hard to create a believable romantic relationship as the play delves further into society’s judgement of couples with more significant than average age gaps. The Island wants to tackle taboos of guilt in parenthood and does come with a disclaimer; however, there is plenty of room to add more questions to examine this to find truth.
The intimate Cervantes Theatre leads itself to these studies and pieces. What we are offered uncovers a lot of nutritional areas of thought, from motherhood, religion and guilt but without going too much deeper. What we see in Rubio’s script is a tendency to lean more into convenient and slightly mundane relationship hurdles rather than getting to the bones of the more controversial content that would really give pause for thought.
Cervantes Theatre, Arch 26 229 Union Street London SE1 0LR until 21st October. Thur-Sat at 7.30pm. Admission: £21 – £28.
Booking: www.cervantestheatre.com – 020 3633 4406
