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Truth, lies and self-delusion
Theatre Exile's "The English Bride'
Steve Cohen
Lucile Lichtblau's The English Bride was inspired by a 1986 incident in which a Jordanian duped an Irish girl into carrying a bomb aboard an El Al flight from London to Tel Aviv in 1986. The terrorist packed the bomb in the carry-on bag of his pregnant fiancée, but the plot was foiled when the bomb was discovered at Heathrow airport.
Lichtblau's play takes place in interrogation rooms at a London airport following the discovery of a similar plot. A Mossad officer (Damon Bonetti) grills an Israeli Arab (J. Paul Nicholas) and his English fiancée (Corinna Burns.) She is a plain barmaid from Leeds in northern England who found romance with a stranger and became pregnant.
Is she an innocent dupe or a willing accomplice? Is her fiancée a coldblooded terrorist or does he really love her? Or both?
As in the popular TV series Homeland, the killers and their adversaries are revealed as charming men responding to personal pressures and desires. The audience is deliberately kept in the dark about the whole truth.
The English Bride makes the point that everyone tells untruths. Interrogators lie about what they've learned from other sources in order to induce confessions; perpetrators lie to cover up their crimes; and accomplices lie to quell their shame at being used. Most confounding is the revelation that terrorists sometimes lie even when they are confessing a crime.
All three principals inhabit their roles convincingly. Their accents are persuasive, thanks to the dialect coaching of Melanie Julian and the direction of Deborah Block.
The English Bride reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope, which chronicled James Stewart's quiet and methodical interrogation of child murderers, based on a real-life murder committed in 1924 by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. That 1948 motion picture similarly used a single, confined set.
One critic in 1948 described Rope as "plainly deliberate." You could say that about Lichtblau's new play as well. It lacks the dramatic excitement that Claire Danes, Mandy Patinkin and Damian Lewis stoke with the edge-of-your seat plot twists in Homeland. But the psychological drama of The English Bride is no less fascinating. We are left with a huge unanswered question: Why would someone want to kill a person who was carrying his unborn child?
Lichtblau's play takes place in interrogation rooms at a London airport following the discovery of a similar plot. A Mossad officer (Damon Bonetti) grills an Israeli Arab (J. Paul Nicholas) and his English fiancée (Corinna Burns.) She is a plain barmaid from Leeds in northern England who found romance with a stranger and became pregnant.
Is she an innocent dupe or a willing accomplice? Is her fiancée a coldblooded terrorist or does he really love her? Or both?
As in the popular TV series Homeland, the killers and their adversaries are revealed as charming men responding to personal pressures and desires. The audience is deliberately kept in the dark about the whole truth.
The English Bride makes the point that everyone tells untruths. Interrogators lie about what they've learned from other sources in order to induce confessions; perpetrators lie to cover up their crimes; and accomplices lie to quell their shame at being used. Most confounding is the revelation that terrorists sometimes lie even when they are confessing a crime.
All three principals inhabit their roles convincingly. Their accents are persuasive, thanks to the dialect coaching of Melanie Julian and the direction of Deborah Block.
The English Bride reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope, which chronicled James Stewart's quiet and methodical interrogation of child murderers, based on a real-life murder committed in 1924 by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. That 1948 motion picture similarly used a single, confined set.
One critic in 1948 described Rope as "plainly deliberate." You could say that about Lichtblau's new play as well. It lacks the dramatic excitement that Claire Danes, Mandy Patinkin and Damian Lewis stoke with the edge-of-your seat plot twists in Homeland. But the psychological drama of The English Bride is no less fascinating. We are left with a huge unanswered question: Why would someone want to kill a person who was carrying his unborn child?
What, When, Where
The English Bride. By Lucile Lichtblau; Deborah Block directed. Theatre Exile production through December 2, 2012 at Studio X, 1340 S. 13th St. (at Reed). (215) 218-4022 or www.theatreexile.org.
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