One Minute

It is interesting how a play written in 2003 shifts its emphasis when viewed through the ‘lense’ of March 2023. It is a play that sets out to examine the fragmented lives and emotions of various people who in are involved in the search for a young girl who has been abducted from the busy London streets. It also demonstrates how strong Simon Stephens script is and how in discovering the angst and struggles that each of the characters is ‘living’ can in their own way stall the ongoing case to find Daisy Shultz. It only took a minute for her to disappear but even after a year the case remains unsolved.

I say March 2023 because seeing this play at a time when the Metropolitan police are under huge scrutiny for misogynistic, homophobic, and racist issues brings the characters of the two policemen to the fore. Your view of who they are and what they say against this current knowledge, makes it more intriguing when they cross the accepted line. Lee Lomas as DI Gary Burroughs is convincing and very watchable but his Birmingham accent does tend to wander around the region. As his young and naïve partner Frederik Lysegaard as DC Robert Evans has all the boyish bravado and misplaced eagerness of a young copper trying to make his mark. They are both, in a way outsiders having joined the metropolitan force from other regions.

It is interested that so much stage time is given to two unreliable witnesses who become flatmates but never friends. Marie Louise (Imogen Davis) is a hyperactive misfit whose statement gets severally questioned and you begin to wonder what her true motivations are. Whilst Catherine (Imogen MacKenzie) is more pragmatic and has the ear of DI Burroughs when he frequents the bar, she works in.

It is also clever that we see less of Daisy’s mother Anne played truthfully by Reshma Morris. It makes her moments even more powerful and keeps the emphasis on the inadequacies of the others and their involvement.

It is surprising to say that at 70 minutes this feels long. But some of the pace drops occasionally and the dialogue in certain scenes didn’t need such slow delivery. With the fragmented nature of this play it needed more variety in the delivery and staging.