Our Few and Evil Days

“If I say it, things will change between us.” We enter the idiosyncratic “O’Roweland” via his penultimate play, ** Our Few and Evil Days ** (2014), under the direction of **João Cardoso**. In the career of **Mark O’Rowe**, this text marks the end of a seven-year hiatus since Terminus (2007), a time during which the playwright focused on several adaptations of Shakespeare and Ibsen, as well as on writing TV and film scripts. The monologue as a narration and recollection device, which had been so used by O’Rowe in the previous plays, is here replaced with a symmetrical, concatenated chronological sequence of six scenes, evenly divided into two acts, with a prologue and an interlude. The power of the performances and the cadence of the brief, naturalistic dialogue, now overlapping, now truncated, that animates them, are a means to unveil a past that gnaws away at the characters. Instead of the flood of words of past works, the language is almost ascetic now. This is because a dark secret haunts the family in Our Few and Evil Days : its outlines make themselves visible as details, pauses and silences, like the patterns in a jigsaw puzzle. With a cinematic flair in the way it suspends each scene, develops ellipses and fades-to-black, this family drama about guilt, sacrifice and love possesses the claustrophobic feel of a psychological thriller shot through with a palpable sadness. “Why don’t you love me?”