Blinded by the plight

BLINDSIDED, Royal Exchange, Manchester, to Feb 15
NOT, I fear, the play Julie Hesmondhalgh and the stage door photographers might have hoped for to give the former “Coronation Street” star a first stage hit after her dramatic and controversial exit from the TV soap.

Playwright Simon Stephens has many fans at the Exchange — he has already presented three premieres there with great success — but this fourth one doesn’t seem to be cut from the same cloth.

Where the previous works were lively and good-humoured (if ultimately not very significant of anything), this one almost sets out to be annoying, and succeeds admirably.

“Blindsided”, which has Julie as the mother of the central character (her daughter) then as the daughter grown older and wiser, 18 years later, is an exercise in borderline sociopathy masquerading as family drama.

Sexually precocious, not-terribly-bright 17-year-old Cathy (Katie West), already a mum, falls for weasly John (Andrew Sheridan).

When she discovers he has later slept with her best friend (Rebecca Callard), she does something so heinous the world can’t forgive her. Eighteen years later we see her again, her crimes unknown to her new neighbours and her outlook on life far different.

You might expect this to be rather sad, both in form and execution, but the characters are so featureless and the direction so flat — director Sarah Frankcom basically has to move five disassociated characters round a plain stage for two hours, and sometimes does so rather lamely — that the audience, or at least this section of it, loses interest in them and their plight.

Stephens’ method seems to be to bind together quirky fragments of plot and character traits to see what the viewer makes of them, in the hope that some will find it profound. I reckon this time he has erred.

The two minor characters come out best: Jack Deam plays a family friend who should, you reckon, turn out to be some sort of predatory paedophile but is actually just a nice guy, while Rebecca Callard is quite sympathetic despite being the “other woman” — both of which revelations blind-sided my expectations, certainly, but not enough for me to think the work a success.