A Play, A Pie And A Pint: Guilty @ Oran Mor

Warning: some stories don’t have happy endings. Before there was Disney, the Brothers Grimm collected fairytales from the oral tradition of storytelling whose original meting out of justice could be seen as cruel and fitting. Moulded from this same metal is Rona Munro’s chilling black comedy Guilty.

A light hums away in a stark room. Two women sit at a table. A woman has disappeared and Detective Black has been called in to take a statement from the step daughter. But what would Blanca know of her step mother’s vanishing into thin air? This is no fairytale; we are living in modern times. Sometimes people are just innocent. 

Guilty is a play which plays with our expectations and our character judgements. Cloaked in the language of fairytales, there are numerous references to this storytelling tradition; however a working knowledge of fairytales is not enough to save the innocent as the evil stepmother archetype is interrogated. Fathers are typically absent from this modern interpretation of Snow White.

Very chatty and unreliable, Louise Ludgate’s Blanca is a treat to watch; her first actions onstage reveal much about her character although we find that’s it’s only skin deep. It’s all Lesley Hart’s Detective Black can do to keep her temper while questioning her charge.

Beautifully written, Guilty is a gem of a play which examines storytelling and further explores the dark side of the step mother/daughter relationship. The moral of the story being it’s best to ken your fairytales. [Susannah Radford]