For Once

Description

In a place where everyone knows your name you can't forget who you are. Life, love and loss in a picture postcard town is laid bare in this heart-breaking but darkly comic new play. Through a series of interweaving accounts For Once cuts to the heart of a family, and a community, turned upside down by unimaginable tragedy. For Once examines the fallout after a car crash on a country lane takes the life of two local teenagers, through three interlaced monologues by their surviving friend Sid and his parents, April and Gordon, exposing the pre-existing faultlines in the family. Sid has been left partially sighted by the crash, and his account of his life before and since the accident gives an insight into why young people living in what seems like 'ideal' communities are driven to seek thrills elsewhere, sometimes with horrifying consequences. However, far from being depressing, Tim Price's skill at capturing the revealing inarticulacy of the teenager, as well as his troubled parents, makes for unexpected humour. For Once is a powerful and incisive look at life and death in a small market town and premiered on 8 July 2011 at the Hampstead Theatre in a production by Pentabus Theatre.

Tim Price is a writer on the cusp of major recognition, with For Once being the first of three major premieres of his work planned over the next year. His next play, Salt, Root and Roe will be seen at Trafalgar Studios in November as part of the Donmar West End season, and in 2012, his play The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning will open for the National Theatre of Wales in Haverfordwest. He was shortlisted for this year's Verity Bargate Award with his play Will and George.

Wry, compassionate and thought-provoking * Caroline McGinn, Time Out London, 21.7.11 * A gentle yet forensic examination of family crisis in a rural town. As the pain, anger, love and anxiety of mother, father and son bleed out in interweaving monologues, the cords that connect them are at once strangulating, sustaining and strained to snapping point..this is sharp-eyed writing, full of humanity and compassion. -- Sam Marlowe * The Times * This elegant, elegiac three-hander winds, with wry humour and occasional mineshafts of buried feeling, through the aftermath of a terrible accident... Price's writing, generously endowed with bitter-sweet one-liners, is quietly compelling. -- Fiona Mountford * Evening Standard * What is remarkable about the drama is that it is not grim or sensationalist... Price's style is gentle... But it is also laugh-out loud funny in places. -- Sarah Hemming * Financial Times * If you don't know the name Tim Price, you will soon... You can see what the fuss is about in this small quiet cracker of a family drama...Fragile and just over an hour long, this is quite an old-fashioned kitchen sink and ironing drama... Price's unflashy play is good on the smug busybody undertones of small-town lives, and makes neat use of humour... It has the lurking power of an unexploded bomb. -- Lyn Gardner * Guardian *