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Review: The Laramie Project

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

Interviews with locals in the aftermath of the real-life murder of gay-hate crime victim Matthew Shepard in Wyoming form The Laramie Project. Moisés Kaufman’s script questions the impact, or lack of, that the murder has had on the community in this tight piece of verbatim theatre – that’s documentary style theatre to you and me. 

The script is slick, the cast of eight rapidly flip between an astonishing sixty characters. Yet it doesn’t come into its own until the end of the first act. The rest of the act offers background on the case that’s interesting, but far less thought-provoking than the questions of homosexual attitudes that make up the second. Directors Benita Tibb and Lucy Shenton decide for there to be no set, with the only props being some torches and a tape player. On entrance into the theatre, the audience are faced with an imposing line of actors at the top of the raked seating, staring down at us and emphasising how we are the audience of a play in a Brechtian style. The rapid movements of the cast between interviews, from the gallery to the stage where we were sat, were polished and clearly heavily rehearsed. It would have been easy to stage the play with the actors in a line, flicking between characters as they recited different interviews. But this innovative and well refined staging helped both the character transitions and created different levels of intensity and a physical hierarchy. 

With so many characters to play, as a whole the actors managed to cope well. American accents did tend to drift from time to time, and the odd awkward pause in the midst of rapid and snappy dialogue made it obvious that someone had forgotten a line, yet this was the first night in an unquestionably challenging play. The absolute standout performance came from James Kitchin, seamlessly slipping from character to character and astonishingly managing to portray the most emotional scene from the play – Matthew Shepard’s father speaking to the courtroom – but keeping the audience at a distance that made them look at the bigger picture. Is the death penalty appropriate? Why there are such hate crimes? How do we overcome such prejudices? 

This was by no means a perfect opening night and fatigue seemed to start to creep in for the cast midway through the second act, yet any weaknesses are made up for by the eventually absorbing story and the unique and exciting staging from the directors. It’s definitely worth going to see if just for that.

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