Eugene O'Hare's first full length play, The Weatherman ran at the Park 200 in August and was a dark depressing insight into an unpleasant seedy subculture of Britain set in the dilapidated, barely habitable bed sit in a block of flats in London of Archie and Beezer played by Mark Hadfield.
His second play Sydney and the old Girl follows on this month and is an equally uncomfortable and difficult watch filled with hatred and bile. Yet in the hands of a brilliant cast of three performers it becomes a compelling and provocative drama.
O'Hare sets this one in the house of Nell, an elderly potty mouthed wheelchair bound old lady. She has not left the house since the death of her young son Bernie in a care home some thirty-five years before. Her other son Sydney is forced to move in when his own flat is unavailable and lives for his inheritance of the house and £60,000 of savings saying he “wants his reward for all the crap". They play a dangerous game of taunting and abusing each other as we begin to understand their past and the impact on both.
