NEVER IN MY LIFETIME
So it’s all the more remarkable that in Never in My Lifetime British playwright Shirley Gee can create a modern Romeo and Juliet, a British Protestant soldier and an Irish Catholic girl whose innocence seems almost as strong as the hatred that surrounds them. Almost–because in this poisoned land innocence is not enough.
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Tom is a lonely country boy bored and frightened by his assignment, counting the seconds till his time is up. Tessie is a Belfast girl for whom the church is a refuge from the hard times and quick death outside.
Gee also provides two pairs of characters who represent the haters and the victims. The victims, helpless witnesses who address the audience, are simply called “wife” and “mother”: the first is the wife of Charlie, Tom’s soldier buddy; the second is Tessie’s mother. Almost matter-of-factly the mother chronicles atrocities she has seen in her neighborhood and in her family. The wife talks of just one horror to come–how Charlie got his head blown open.
Amid the mutilation, it’s amazing to see affection. As the lovers, Steven Farber and Marguerite Hammersley powerfully reinvent it all–the reckless infatuation, the desperate yearning, the scared sex. Farber, who made a stunning debut in DePaul’s excellent The Misanthrope at the Blackstone, perfectly catches Tom’s contradictions and complexity, his loyalty to a queen he’s never seen, and his ardor for one very ordinary girl. Looking like a new Natalie Wood, Hammersley as Tessie is a worthy successor to Wood, sensitive to every quicksilver change in her tortured lover.
