Moonlight After Midnight

If Moonlight After Midnight were easier to follow, I’m sure it would make for an incredible piece from Concrete Drops Theatre. However, as it stands, I felt very much like a ‘lay person’ in the audience, witnessing something that was way above my comprehension, even as a regular theatre-goer. In this intriguing yet heavy drama, a chance hotel room encounter leads to a man and a woman challenging each other to play new personas. Eventually, who they are and why they are there becomes completely lost amongst the multiple storylines they have created for themselves.

Moonlight After Midnight will interest those who like their theatre dense and full of meta-narratives.

There is no doubt that Moonlight After Midnight has been written with brave innovation at the heart of it by Martin Dockrey. This is a performance that forces audiences to accept that sometimes theatre doesn’t give concrete answers and it’s certainly like nothing I’ve seen before. The two performers, Dockrey and Vanessa Quesnelle, certainly prove themselves versatile and up to the job of performing such a complex piece.

However, this productionfeels more like a theatrical exercise from a rehearsal room than a performance. There are no great fluctuations in volume or emotion, making it easy to become bewildered in all the many directions the dialogue takes us. This kind of diversity in performance is crucial for a play with more conversation than action, and Moonlight After Midnight is severely lacking here. The play disappointingly remains on one level throughout, even though its complexity offers so much room for more.

Moonlight After Midnight will interest those who like their theatre dense and full of meta-narratives. It does have a place at Fringe, but will appeal to a niche audience.