Dusk Rings a Bell has a glaring and, well, annoying, problem: it thinks it’s far cleverer than it actually is. It imparts knowledge as a substitute for intelligent writing, unaware that intelligence is the ability to use this knowledge to create something from it, even if that something is just to show you‘ve understood it. What we get instead from playwright Stephen Belber is the dramatic equivalent of bringing to life an A-Level psychology and criminology textbook, without the comprehension required to make that knowledge into a working play.Dusk Rings a Bell follows the story of Ray (Paul Blair) and Molly (Abi Titmuss), who kissed on a lifeguard stand aged 15 and 16, 24 years ago in Chesapake Bay - the coastal setting beautifully suggested by the set design. A chance meeting occurs when Molly breaks in to the summer house she used to stay in, in order to retrieve a note she wrote for her 39-year-old self, and Ray is the caretaker that finds her. At first unsure of each other, they start to reminisce and the warm feeling returns until the - slightly clumsy - revelation that Ray was involved in the murder of a gay man. The rest of the play examines the fallout.Both Titmuss and Blair are extremely watchable in their roles and have got down the cut-glass American accent from that part of the Eastern Seaboard. Nevertheless, whilst there is a contrast in style between both characters’ monologues, with Molly’s education giving her a justifiably bigger vocabulary, the heavily psycho-analytic prose Belber employs often manages to destroy the verisimilitude of the naturalistic characters Titmuss and Blair are trying hard to inhabit. Unless the characters took a long, immersive course in psychology that isn’t alluded to in the play and you’re meant to have guessed they have, the words and self-philosophising just don’t seem at home in their mouths. It’s a pity, because when there are genuine moments where the text and performance meet in emotional significance, the audience have become detached from the action and no longer care.The play asks some interesting questions of us about memory, forgiveness and who we think we are, it just spends too much time showing us how clever it is asking these questions and not enough being a play. Thanks must go to Titmuss and Blair’s performances for making it seem like it was.
