Heart-breaking, and compelling in By the Light of the Moon, Shea Donovan proves a talented creator, and a gifted performer.
📍Old Red Lion Theatre Pub, London
📅 28 Oct
💷 £10
🕖 8:30pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 45 minutes
🗣️ Writer/Director/Performer: Shea Donovan
🎂 18+
🎭 Listed Building – Limited Mobility Access
Having enjoyed successful runs at several festivals, most recently the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe, the multi-talented Shea Donovan (and I use this term advisedly), brought By the Light of the Moon to the venerable Old Red Lion Theatre Pub in Angel. Part of the Theatre’s Halloween themed Grimfest, it’s a mysterious, gothic tragedy, but more importantly a truly human tale.
A one act, solo work, the play concerns Lila (Shea Donovan), a young woman sent to a mental asylum in 1928. Society is yet to shed a perniciously misogynist streak to the treatment of female mental health, the word ‘hysterical’ still being in circulation , but back in the early 20th century, matters were significantly worse.
Lila is unquestionably damaged, her purchase on reality tenuous and prone to episodes of mania, and a retreat into the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear. She is bright, charming, and above all, innocent. Innocent even of her own predicament, imprisoned without end, and abandoned by the family she loved.
Donovan is magnificent, and brings Lila to an entirely manifest life. As a performer, she is gifted with presence & clarity; blessed with qualities of pathos, and its sometime friend bathos. It’s a pleasure to watch her work. Her character is by definition, an unreliable narrator, unable, perhaps unwilling to process her situation. The narrative tension of the play relies on the gradual reveal of her reality, a device which could sink towards melodrama and the hammy. However, there’s such honesty and integrity in both writing & performance that the audience need never worry.
Lila has but one friend, ‘Gertrude’, a fellow patient, but one whose likely entirely rational hatred for their living situation confuses Lila, who views it as a temporary secondment from life as normal. When Gertrude disappears, it sets in motion a chain of progressively more cogent, and more disturbing thoughts. The guileless charm of the opening scenes begins to crumble, and through the cracks seeps anger, and agitation. Stories of youthful adventures with her upper-crust family, of feeling loved and appreciated, give way to other, darker recollections.
Though monologue in form, Donovan wisely eschews being all tell and no show, investing Lila with a physical life, critical to her understanding. A clever use of just a few props provides physical manifestations of her mind-state, from front-stage precocity, to scrubbing at her woes on hands and knees. One actor, but two chairs, Lila is always in conversation with someone who isn’t there.
A great, and horrid wrong has been done to her, one this unsophisticated (as trained by society) young woman can’t understand, but knows it has to do with her daddy’s friend ‘Jonathan’. The horror of By the Light of the Moon, is no simple affair, nor product any single revelation. Rather it’s a tapestry of wrongs, and the cascade of injustice, and misery which has followed.
Donovan exhibits a fine instinct for pace and timing, her script nipping along through vignettes, a lean, mean narrative machine. The denouement, when free of the time pressures of Fringe theatre, might benefit from 5 minutes further delay however. A little more room for development and context might remove a sense of abrupt termination.
That said, By the Light of the Moon is an impressive achievement, and offers a thrilling showcase for a performer of tremendous ability. Let’s hope we see more of Shea Donovan, and soon.
(Photography Credits: SHEA DONOVAN / INDIGO ARTS COLLECTIVE)
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