Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me

In a windowless Middle Eastern cell, three men are chained to the floor, and they are laughing. It’s desperate laughter, meant to defy their captors and keep hope alive in even this most lightless of places.

Inspired by the hostage crisis which swept Lebanon in the late 1980, Frank McGuinness’ brooding slow-burner foregoes political discussion to focus unflinchingly on characters stripped of all their defences. Rather than violence, they endure crushing boredom as they wait out their interminable imprisonment, alternating between bickering, childlike flights of fantasy and surges of panic.

It could easily become overwhelmingly bleak, but director Michael Attenborough navigates it all with great sensitivity and measured pacing. A regular collaborator with McGuinness, Attenborough’s sympathetic production quietly revels in the script’s heightened language and frequent humour.

Among an impressive cast, Rory Keenan is particularly nuanced as garrulous Irish journalist Edward. The most fully realised of the characters, we see him progress through anger, denial and ultimately acceptance as he grieves for his stolen freedom.

Award-winning designer Robert Jones excels himself, too, with a strikingly ominous set. Adrift under the oppressive weight of rusty pipes suspended overhead, a concrete slab floats in a pool of shadow, eloquently conveying the character’s perilous isolation.

Though first produced in the 1990s (Hampstead Theatre, 1992), and set very consciously in the 1980s, the play is no less relevant today. If anything, it’s acquired an undercurrent of grim nostalgia for a time when acts of inhumanity were shocking for their rarity instead of their ubiquity.