All Alone

USER (10May06): CULTURE www.gcn.ie DENIS KEHOE GAY THEATRE FESTIVAL: ALL ALONE 10 May 2006 DENIS KEHOE Like Christine Jorgensen Reveals, All Alone was acclaimed at last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival. While the former is a hard act to follow, All Alone is an all-together different piece of work. Written by Gene David Kirk and presented by Post Script Theatre from London, the play is an examination of child sex abuse, both from the stance of victim and perpetrator. Man A and Man B are essentially the same man at different stages in his life; the boy abused by his father and the man using the internet to lure underage girls into his perverse world. To say that it is a disturbing and confrontational piece of theatre is to put it mildly, but All Alone uses its material in a challenging, interesting way. With the same man in different guises moving about the stage, revealing his most deplorable and damaged sides, the play is a powerful, unsettling piece. Both Andrew Barron and Ben Carpenter are excellent as the man and the boy, respectively capturing the abuser and the abused in equally effective ways. They are mentally, emotionally as well as physically stripped to the core, moving about a set that works well as a manifestation of the troubling subject matter. Graphic, violent and traumatic, All Alone is a play that isn't for those easily disturbed. But it is a quality production that bravely investigates an unsavoury but all too real topic in a skillful, powerful, sometimes abrasive way, always assured in its judgements of right and wrong.