It is always a salutary exercise to fit faces to the statistics of tragedy, to humanise horror to a level we can start to comprehend. This was presumably the intention of Spanish playwright Paloma Pedrero, who deals with the 2004 Madrid train bombings by focusing on three women linked to one (fictional) victim.
Angel - which I always thought was pronounced "Ang-hell", rather than, like here, with heavenly overtones - has undertaken his normal commute to work on that fateful March morning. His lover, wife and mother await news. The fact that all three women are portentously called Ana sounds the first warning that this piece plumbs dramatic shallows rather than real-life depths.
Pedrero has taken on a lot of weighty issues, on levels both personal and political. Yet, with the help of translator/director Robert Shaw, she manages to blend them all, in a 55-minute running time that seems far longer in this hot studio with uncomfortable bench seating, into a general, unilluminating mope.
Lines as gratingly kooky as "I won't believe he's dead unless he tells me himself " are hopelessly out of kilter with the subject matter. Isobel Pravda and Jessica Oyelowo let it all out and keep it all in respectively, and impressively, as the younger women, but their life-is-unfair-terrorismispointless lines achieve nothing.
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Anastasia Volochkova: Eternal Love
