Five Gold Rings
I feel sorry for Joanna Laurens. Having been praised for the poetic inventiveness of her first play, The Three Birds, I suspect she will take a lot of flak for writing a non-naturalistic family drama. Yet, since we sanction all kinds of wild physical theatre, it seems only right that we should find room for linguistic experiment.
Laurens’s play sounds like a conventionally unhappy family reunion. Henry, a penniless patriarch living in a mysterious desert, is attended at Christmas by his two sons and their wives. But both marriages are in trouble; and when the supposedly impotent Daniel is attracted to his childless sister-in-law, Miranda, the skeletons come tumbling out of the family cupboard. Daniel’s plan to flee with Miranda is unwittingly financed by his brother, Simon, which leads to revelations of revenge, rape and incest.
