LOSS & HOPE: THE GIFT (Forty-Five North)***

  

By Emma 

Link: https://www.forty-fivenorth.com/loss-hope-the-gift 

Available until: Unknown

I think The Gift is one of those plays that seem really simple on the surface, though they are lovely but there’s a deeper meaning underneath.

The problem is I’m not sure what the deep meaning is.

It’s about a girl who suddenly realises she’s lost her ring. She starts to look for it and then she sees someone she never expected to see again. There’s more to it than that but I don’t want to give the whole plot away.

I think maybe there’s a connection between the ring and the person she meets and that maybe the ring was with her when she needed it but when she didn’t need it anymore, it disappeared? Something like that.

It’s by Rafaella Marcus and she was supposed to have her first play (which doesn’t seem to be this one) hosted and developed in 2020. It doesn’t say why it doesn’t happen but I think we can all guess. It’s really sad but it says they’ll develop the play anyway so that’s good.

The Gift is really lovely and simple but probably a bit too clever for me, which isn’t Rafaella’s fault. The girl is a really likeable character and the situation described seems really real and a lot of it is the sort of thing that might happen to anyone. I like the way the girl realised the ring was gone. It’s very realistic.

The director is Jessica Lazar and I really like the way she sees the play as being so simple and conversational. The things that happened could have been performed in a dramatic way because they are very surprising but that’s not the way it’s presented and I like that. Olivia Marcus performs the role and I like the way she tells the story because she makes it sound believable and as though it definitely did happen. She doesn’t sound like she’s making it up or exaggerating it.

The Gift is the last play in a set of three monologues called Loss & Hope. They all have the loss and hope theme but they are all completely different types of stories with very different narrators. They’re all worth listening to.