FringeReview UK 2024
Two Rounds
Footprints Festival, Jermyn Street Theatre co-produced with Aslant Theatre Company
Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Due Partite, Two Matches, Two Rounds. Four women meet in 1966. Their daughters meet in 1996. Sounds familiar. Film-maker and novelist Cristina Comencini famously developed her 1996 play Two Rounds into a novel (2006) and film (2009).
It’s the last – and most substantial – of six plays in Jermyn Street’s Footprints Festival, directed by Aida Rocci in association with Aslant Theatre, till February 10th.
Though without theatrical surprise, Two Rounds is a superbly-acted, deeply satisfying work exploring the limits of choices. How these women go second rounds with the same DNA to see if they can manage anything better, or just differently. Absorbing.
Written by Cristina Comencini and Directed by Aida Rocci, Set and Costume Designer Evelien Van Camp, Lighting Designer Han Sayles, Sound Designer Hattie North, Movement Director Phoebe Hyder, Stage Manager Heather Smith
Translators Aida Rocci, Paul Hilliar, Tessa Nelson
Festival Designer Natalie Johnson, Festival Lighting Designer Laura Howard
PR David Burns, Marketing/Production Photography Giulia Delprato, Lead Artwork Photography Jack Sain and Graphic Design Jonny Woolley
Programme Design Frederick Zennor, Producer Footprints Festival.
Special Thanks to Valentina Monaca, Michele Gentiel, bttina John, Foreign affairs, Roseanna Frascona and Ingrid Werner.
Till February 10th
Review
Due Partite, Two Matches, Two Rounds. Four women meet in 1966. Their daughters meet in 1996. Sounds familiar. Film-maker and novelist Cristina Comencini famously developed her 1996 play Two Rounds into a novel (2006) and film (2009).
It’s the last – and in two acts and 105 minutes most substantial – of six plays in Jermyn Street’s Footprints Festival, directed by Aida Rocci in association with Aslant Theatre, till February 10th.
Unlike the film and as you’d expect, roles here are doubled. 1966. Four women ostensibly meet to play cards. Thursday’s the highlight of their week, their shot at freedom. There’s apple-pie Claudia (Natalie Cutler later her lawyer daughter Cecilia) who proclaims her perfect marriage only to admit it’s not. That’s because Sofia (in Saria Steyl’s slinky, contained performance, later her daughter Rossana, a doctor) unlike everyone else is explicit about sex, about her lover. But he’s just called. She resents her daughter whose imminence enforced marriage.
There’s downright tactless, selfish but warm concert pianist Gabriella (Flora Sowerby later Sara, also a concert pianist) who’s given her career up: despite encouragement she proclaims you can’t be both pianist and mother. A lesson she instils in her daughter. Finally the youngest Beatrice (Daria Mazzocchio) hasn’t yet birthed her child whom she might call Giulia. The others disagree whether to tell her how agonising childbirth is.
Two Rounds explores both the limits of how far women came in 30 years; at the remove of another 30, we can look again. 1996’s mobile phones and over-anxious New Man husbands aren’t perhaps as far from us as 1966 was from 1996. Though equal rights were granted in 1948, it took a long time for divorce, women owning capital and abortion to become accepted. Rocci brings out Comencini’s subtle shifts, showing how some things don’t alter.
Evelien Van Camp’s bright 1966 costumes contrast with 1996’s more Versace understatement. Her set builds on Festival designer Natalie Johnson’s gabled work: black-and-white cuttings gauzed over latterly with muslin for 1996. Han Sayles’ lighting marks subtle shifts for different eras.
A crucial speech is given to Steyl’s Sofia, the most explicitly liberated: how women are drawn back to the most primitive function, birthing children: everything’s stripped away, it hurtles women back to the stone age. How Sofia resents Rossana.
Sowerby’s bouncy Gabriella is like Sofia honest but more tactless, if more loving of her daughter. Sowerby brings an earthy outdoor tang to Gabriella, the concert hall extrovert not always noticing anything delicate beyond her fingertips: when she played everything else vanished. That she feels was the problem.
Sowerby’s Sara, more comfortably brash than her mother has also fulfilled her. Her clingy conductor husband is eventually cut off. Sara’s the one with the baton.
Cutler’s Claudia unfolds love of friends and children, peeling back jittery surface perfection to reveal that’s all she has. Her lawyer daughter Cecilia echoes her in pent-up nerves, finding no right man; but takes a year off to try donor IVF in the quietest revolution of all.
Beatrice relates how her mother instilled a love of books, before she committed suicide. Mazzocchio’s touching, shy Beatrice met her husband through Rilke’s poetry, is always on the point of reading his handwritten copy of a poem, but contractions keep intervening. With art versus life, life will win. But is communicating through books enough? As put-upon PA Giulia is not only unfulfilled, but aware how trauma’s inherited and can be passed on.
Steyl’s doctor Rossana, describes how she and her doctor husband have infrequent sex because of mismatched medical shifts in their beach hut. She openly describes desire; but also how her husband thinks she doesn’t want a child. In Steyl’s wry unwinding of an overworked medic describing release, tensions of work, there’s expectation, misunderstanding invading Rossana’s otherwise loving marriage.
But it’s the funeral of one mother, in harrowing circumstances, that’s brought them together. Limits of male and female understanding are explored. It’s a comedy unafraid of the dark. And there’s the matter of the poem and a last line that caps it.
Though without theatrical surprise, Two Rounds is a superbly-acted, deeply satisfying work exploring the limits of choice. How these women – resembling their mothers in nurture and nature – go second rounds with the same DNA to see if they can manage anything better, or just differently. Absorbing.
