PAST TENSE
Old Red Lion

IT is easy to dismiss old relatives as boring people with uninteresting lives.
But in her new play, Past Tense, Emma Blundell challenges her audience to re-assess their opinions of seemingly uninteresting family members.
The play flits between the present, where three cousins sort through their dead great aunt’s possessions, and the past, pre and post-war, where the great aunt has a love affair with her girlfriend Barbara.
Emma Blundell builds up the complicated relationship between the three cousins, Joanna, Claire and Felicity, with her convincing dialogue.
Mixing humour with tension, the characters demonstrate their rivalries and insecurities.
Felicity, played by Sasha Hermann, is petulant and self-centred.
Her behaviour is amusing, but also unnerving, as it veils the jealousy she feels towards her pregnant cousin Joanna (Susannah Coster), who seems to have the perfect family life. Joanna resents her younger cousin Felicity but it is not clear why until the second half of the play. Claire (Victoria Meakin) acts as the peacemaker between her bickering cousins.
As the play develops it becomes clear that the cousins know almost nothing about their great aunt.
The director, Nina Brazier, contrasts the cousins’ speculation about their great aunt’s life with the reality by using lighting to switch scene from the present to the past with the characters from both ages remaining on stage.
Through the scenes with great aunt Carol (Katie Russell) and her lover Barbara (Sheeran Taaffe), the audience learns about the difficulties of lesbian relationships in the past.
It was frustrating to watch the cousins rooting through the possessions oblivious to the love that brightened up her life. But that is part of the success of Emma Blundell’s play; it highlights how easy it is to underestimate the people around us.

Until July 9
020 7837 7816