Homerton Small Studio
(Transferring to the Judith Wilson Drama Studio on the 25th)
Dir: Kiran Gill
Four Stars

There is a notice on the door of the Homerton Small Studio: ‘Warning: contains scenes which viewers might find upsetting’. When You Cure Me is certainly not an easy play to watch, but viewers should by no means stay away.

Shortly before the play opens, seventeen-year-old Rachel was brutally raped and beaten by an unknown attacker. The shock of this has made her lose the use of her legs, and now she lies in her childhood-customised-into-teenagerhood bedroom (printed cotton quilt, Harry Potter books, outsize cushion collection) watched over by her boyfriend, Peter, and sometimes by his friends James and Alice.

The four actors make a very strong team, portraying a group of sixth formers coming to terms with Rachel’s attack with enforced maturity and occasional vodka-swigging bravado. For long stretches the play is essentially a two-hander, with Katy Bulmer and Matthew Eberhardt giving moving performances as the damaged Rachel and the sensitive Peter. Their conversations skitter nervously from the banal to the traumatic, as Rachel haltingly tells the story of her rape. Initially played with a slightly stilted bashfulness, Eberhardt’s Peter grows in stature as the play progresses; he adapts to Rachel’s mental turmoil with puppyishly eager practicality (their debate about tampon-buying raised the one real laugh of the show) and anxious kindness. Bulmer’s Rachel is painfully mesmeric, alternating between carefully unemotional descriptions of her attack, flashes of frightened anger, and hesitant sexual advances towards Peter.

The supporting roles of James and Alice are ably played by Luke Aylward and Vivienne Claire. James brings crude but cheerful normality and an illicit bottle of Smirnoff. Claire plays the well-meaning, breathtakingly thoughtless Alice like an untied helium balloon, flying between ill-considered topics (classroom gossip, her part in the school musical, her thoughts on losing her virginity to James) with vapid disregard for Rachel’s hostile monosyllables. It is a testament to her performance, however, that Alice remains more than a giggling caricature, and that her final scene is sympathetic.

When You Cure Me is directed by Kiran Gill, who is also Homerton College’s Welfare Officer – all proceeds are being given to RASAC (Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Centre). Her staging of the play is a result of a search for a way of raising awareness of sexual abuse without resorting to “the traditional informational poster” or “a dramatisation of an ‘issue’ ”. When You Cure Me achieves Gill’s aims in an effective, disturbing manner.

Elizabeth Dearnley