"Blackout Songs". Burton Taylor Studio
The publicity material describes Blackout Songs as an 'intensely intimate exploration of tenderness, memory and addiction'. But it's more than that. This is a love story written in the dregs of a wine bottle. Two people meet at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and the play maps out their on/off relationship over an unspecified span of years. And it's unspecified for a reason. Joe White's play, first staged in 2022, captures moments of lucidity between what might be days, months or years of inebriation. The two women (I'm not sure we ever learn their real names) sometimes don't even recognise each other, and sometimes heap resentment and recrimination full of mis-memories around themselves like fortifications against an army of emotional rejection. But they keep coming back for more - because there are two addictions at work here: alcoholism and - equally fatal - human attraction. In its original, professional form, Blackout Songs was a sobering analysis o...