Adler & Gibb

A look at the life of the celebrated artist Janet Adler through the eyes of an actress seeking to play her on film who visits her house to dig up some character and ends up digging up more.

This play has an impeccable pedigree but for me it just didn't work. Certainly in this staging, I found the play, and the characters, simply impossible to engage with. I felt like the production was purposely pushing me into the role of an outside observer, creating barriers between me as audience and the characters, squashing any empathy I might have had with them and turning them into mannequins. This might have been deliberate as Janet Adler and her partner also rejected the world and pushed it away, but in a theatrical context it simply left me cold.