San Diego

I went to Winchester on Saturday to give a talk about David Greig and to watch a production of San Diego, performed by second-year drama students at the university and directed by Marianne Sharp and Marilena Zaroulia, both lecturers there and former PhD students at Royal Holloway that I supervised and advised.

The production was extremely good. Fiercely committed performances by the students, who managed to capture that odd tone - simultaneously funny, strange, and sad - that runs right through the play. The directors kept the play moving; literally, there was a restless kinetic energy of migration, passing traffic, travel in the play. It was performed traverse, which is always a good configuration for journeys and movement, but they would cunningly keep flipping the configurations; a bed with a TV would be on one side of the stage then reappear, reversed on the other side. The actress playing Laura was particularly strong, committing hard to the difficult, bloody, beautiful emotions of the part, playing it bruised, angry and sexy all at once. The design was a white box, reminiscent actually of the original 2003 performance, and the opening image of the travel cases being wheeled through the space also recalled the Lyceum.

Most of all, I reflected watching it that San Diego might be the best play of the decade. It’s a masterpiece, really it is, and if it had gone on in London I’m sure it would be on everyone’s lips. It captures the 2000s the way Attempts on Her Life wrestled the 1990s to the ground. The global movement, the playfulness with authorship, the intimations of religion, the cutting, the romance, the intertwined stories, the fluidity and instability of character, the sheer fucking daring of the writing. It’s the most incredible pleasure to encounter this beautiful play again.