Cans – Written by Stuart Slade
Performed by
Jennifer Clement (Three Sisters, Love and Understanding)
and
Graham O’Mara (Sense and Sensibilty, Othello)
The last year of Dad’s life was a nightmare. But you know what? That was one year in fifty. Rest of his life was pretty much awesome for him, you know? And I keep saying to myself – one year in fifty – that still makes his life, like, 98 percent happy, right? That’s pretty good statistics, right?
Jen’s Dad was a chat show host, a national treasure. But now he’s dead and Jen’s getting spat at in supermarkets. To make matters worse, Uncle Len has made it his mission to help her get over it. Hiding from a very hostile world in a very shitty garage, Len and Jen down cider, drown mice, talk crap, mend cats, share painful secrets, tell appalling jokes and try to work out whether either of them has any kind of future whatsoever.
Stuart Slade’s searingly funny debut play is about death, betrayal and the possibility of forgiveness. And cider. Cans is a dangerously intimate piece, charting the murky areas of unknowing that exist between us and the people we love most in the world.
Director Dan Pick and writer Stuart Slade met and formed Kuleshov in February 2013 at Theatre503’s Rapid Write Response programme, working on a piece called Amsterdamaged. This has since led to them working together and Cans was developed at Theatre503 from a short play called Of Mice and Len in December 2013. Cans was written specifically for Graham O’Mara and Jennifer Clement and they contributed very strongly to the development of the piece and the characters.
Stuart Slade says, ‘What’s made Cans such a delight to work on is that it’s absolutely been a group endeavour from the start. I set out to write a two-hander specifically for Jen Clement and Graham O’Mara, and they’ve both been there from the very beginning – working on every aspect of the plot and characters, and contributing at least as much as I have. The parts are theirs, in a very literal sense.’
Director Dan Pick comments, ‘Stuart has an extraordinary gift for handling universal problems, tragedies and joys with immense pathos and power. The most emotionally engaging theatre I have seen and read has always dispensed with the comfort of judgemental distance, and the directness of the questions that Stuart’s writing poses feels to me as though he’s shedding some kind of light on the human condition. Stuart’s punchy script bubbles with warmth and compassion for his characters, with a wicked sense of humour shining brightly in the pitch black.’
Cans is produced by new company Kuleshov of which Graham O’Mara, Dan Pick and Stuart Slade are artistic directors. It is being produced in association with Etch Theatre, a new Peckham based company focussing on the development of new writing cofounded by Lucy Hollis and Ruth Milne.
Performance Dates Tuesday 4th – Saturday 29th November 2014 (Tues – Sat, 7.45pm, Sun 5pm)
Running time 80 minutes
Theatre503, The Latchmere, 503 Battersea Park Road, London SW11 3BW
