Review: Before After, Southwark Playhouse
Photo credit: Southwark Playhouse
Picture the scene: a tree stands atop a beautiful hillside, the sun is setting, it’s a place you’ve finally gone back to after time away and standing there is a person who you used to go there with, someone you haven’t seen in years, someone special to you. You recognise them straight away but they look back at you and have no idea who you are. What would you do? Well, that’s exactly the situation faced by Ami in new musical Before After, staged as a read-through production at the Southwark Playhouse and streamed live into our homes.
In a world full of social distancing, support bubbles and many hoops to jump through to ensure a secure fashion, theatre is continuing to find ways to make live performance happen. In this performance of Stuart Matthew Price and Timothy Knapman’s Before After, real life married couple Rosalie Craig (Company, City of Angels) and Hadley Fraser (Young Frankenstein, City of Angels) play Ami and Ben respectively; two very different characters who were once in love and brought back together after time apart. With vocals on point throughout, drifting through the flowing melodies with ease, it was beautiful and hypnotic in both its storytelling and simplicity.
Over the last couple of years, I have been fortunate enough to see Rosalie Craig leading the recent gender swapped production of Company as Bobbi, and to see Hadley Fraser as Frederick in the hilarious Young Frankenstein. I remember being blown away by both of them as they have such great stage presence and an ability to make their characters 100% believable, with perfect vocals that soar up to the rafters. Even through a computer screen, everything I thought when seeing these talented performers in the flesh is still true. Even with just the two of them, positioned behind music stands in a nearly empty space, everything about the performance is polished, clean and stage ready. Fraser brings a great deal of comedy to the energetic Ben, throwing in some comedic voices with every emotion clear in his facial expressions and Craig can say so much without saying anything at all!
In this two-person show, highlighting the ups and downs of relationships affected and torn apart by difficult lifestyles and circumstances, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years. Both shows jump back and forth in time, jumping to different points in the relationship. Where The Last Five Years skips from the beginning to the end of Cathy and Jamie’s relationship, Before After flips back and forth between before and after Ben’s memory loss. Some beautifully charming illustrations are used to split the scenes and help us to follow the timing of each snippet, but even so it did get a little bit confusing at times with the time zones switching at the drop of a hat. Nevertheless, you cannot help but be swept away by the plot and wish them well. You want to see them find their happy ending and succeed.
The music is beautiful throughout with particular highlights being ‘As Long As You’re There’, ‘This Time’ and ‘Before After’. You cannot fault the vocals, and the music flows nicely through the story. It all feels effortless and allows you to become engrossed in the storytelling. I truly feel this is a show that could grow into something wonderful if given the opportunity for a fully staged production. And let’s face it, in the current circumstances, a show that only requires two people could do very well. Just look at the recent success of The Last Five Years!
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Rebecca Wallis
