MAYER WAKEFIELD is entertained but let down by an audacious production that, sadly, doesn't ring true
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Watching Rosie
Original Theatre Online
SHORT plays are catching on at a time when brief snippets of other people’s lives add colour and vigour to enforced domesticity and Watching Rosie — a miniature close-up of life in lockdown — is a little gem.
Written by Louise Coulthard and benefiting from a star cast, it’s a gentle, touching conversation between Rosie and her dementia-prone Gran. While the former is anxious and strained, Gran is coping, in a bemused sort of way, with an enforced lockdown imposed on her by a government who see her as a prime Covid risk.
Only when the doorbell rings and Gran leaps to the door for company, is there a sense of her desperate aloneness, otherwise masked by disconnected chit-chat interspersed with startling moments when her grasp on reality takes a sudden nose-dive.
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