These three plays show Sonya Kelly’s work building in scale and ambition. Her brilliant comic skills are shown in Furniture (2018), a sequence of three two-handers. At a furniture exhibition, a pretentious artist and his surgeon wife are celebrating their wedding anniversary. Marital bickering starts with a chair and escalates towards marriage breakdown. The grotty recliner introduced into Stef’s immaculately tasteful flat by her hippy partner Dee is so appalling that their plan of living together blows up. The camp dying actor George tries to leave his treasured chaise longue to his lawyer nephew Michael, who will have none of it. In all three, conflicts ricochet off the furniture.
Characters collide in comedy. In Once Upon a Bridge (2021), starting from a literal real-life collision – a man out jogging on Putney Bridge in London ran into a woman who was nearly killed by an oncoming bus – Kelly imagined the three figures involved. The Man, an unscrupulously go-getting hedge-fund manager, is late for a vital promotion interview. The Woman is an Irish immigrant, determined to make her way as a barrister in the British legal system. Her life is saved by the Bus Driver, though he too is under pressure to keep to his schedule. The enforced social distancing of the internal monologues of the three, live-streamed in the Covid lockdown, highlights the chanciness of this moment in their colliding lives.
With The Last Return (2022), Kelly created a savagely satirical comedy. In the theatre foyer, the Newspaper Man, the Umbrella Woman and the Military Man each has their own desperate, obsessive reasons for needing to get the last return ticket to the booked-out play. With the presiding automaton-like Ticket Person, the play seems a throwback to Ionesco. The scene is changed by the addition of the Woman in Pink, a Somali immigrant. She is left to claim the last return when all the others in the queue are killed in a sequence of lethal violence. And the play ends with the appearance of the girl whose backpack had been used to keep her place, the Woman’s long-lost daughter for whom she has searched Europe. With her gift for comedy and her sharp political vision, it will be interesting to see where Kelly goes next.
Nicholas Grene is the author of Irish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century (OUP Oxford, 2024)
