Ruth Negga, that beguiling Irish actress, last appeared on a London stage in 2011, starring in Playboy of the Western World at the Old Vic. Since then, her career has flourished in the States , with Negga receiving a Best Actress Oscar nomination in 2017 for Loving and most recently starring opposite Daniel Craig in Macbeth on Broadway. Of all the pieces one might have expected for her theatre return, absolutely no one would have placed a bet on Quiet Songs .
This fascinating but bewildering work, 60 minutes of near darkness, is the 2024 winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award, an annual prize given to emerging creators of experimental drama. Finn Beames & Company offer a tale of teenage isolation packaged into a multi-sensory environment, as one actor and four string players weave around each other in the gloaming. Negga, whom we first see curled in a foetal position on a raised platform, is quite simply Boy; she stands up to reveal a school uniform jumper and trousers and is instantly compelling as a teenager waiting to grow into his body.
Boy is lonely, bullied and gay, an outsider lost in the adolescent jungle of school, where the other boys speak in “voices scrounged from films or older siblings”. Director/writer/composer Finn Beames has described this as a semi-autobiographical portrait and the lived emotion rings deep and true. The violin (Fra Rustumji), viola (Chihiro Ono), cello (Hoda Jahanpour) and double bass (Thea Sayer) players are anything bu.
