GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
WHEN asked recently whether he would describe his latest work as a play, Chris Thorpe replied: “I don’t care.” He’s not a traditional playwright and Victory Condition is not a traditional, or easily understood, play.
In it Man (Jonjo O’Neill) and Woman (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) have just returned from a holiday in Greece, not that you’d be able to tell from their largely morbid overlapping monologues, whose subject matter wafts from dreams where “angels were aliens” to “a man in a Moscow hotel room bleeding secrets,” all reeled off at a ferocious pace.
If you try hard enough to stitch a plot together you can just about decipher that Man is a sniper with his high-velocity rifle trained on a protester he is falling for, while Woman is a graphic designer for a monolithic multinational who cannot escape the lucid horror of the imagery on the daily news.
MAYER WAKEFIELD is gripped by a production dives rapidly from champagne-quaffing slick to fraying motormouth
MARY CONWAY revels in the Irish American language and dense melancholy of O’Neill’s last and little-known play
Above a Gothic bar just down from Brighton station, something spooky is happening, suggests JAMES WALSH



