Nocturne is that rarest most precious piece of theatre, the one for which you feel privileged at having it shared with you, the one where you do not want it to end so that you may stay trapped in its pain and grief and beauty and hope forever and never escape.
Our resilient narrator starts by proclaiming that, ‘Fifteen years ago I killed my sister’, after which Alan Rapp’s symphonically beautiful script takes us through this narrator’s journey from the horrific yet unimaginably poetic description of his sister’s death, to the numb and empty aftermath, to being at the wrong end of a barrel of a gun being held by his father, to New York City, to a retreat within a world of literature, to love and lust and humiliation and then back home again.
Our narrator is a piano prodigy, trained ‘like a trainer trains his horse’ to achieve greatness, only to tear himself and his family apart through a tragic accident, taking the life of his sister thus leaving a void that can never be filled. It is a story of such pain, such grief, but which finds beauty and a lyrical optimism at its heart even at the bleakest of moments.
Peter McDonald gives a mesmerising performance; an utterly captivating tour de force that took me through the vast majority of emotions of which I am capable. Never have I been gripped so entirely by a solo show.
Of the Traverse programme so far I would recommend Nocturne most highly. Two hours on it remains firmly in my mind, its pulsing heart still beating absolutely in time with my own.
[Oli Seadon]
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