St Petersburg
St Petersburg
A haunting, elliptical play by a talented writer from Northern Ireland.
St Petersburg comprises three scenes involving three characters, an old man, his middle-aged daughter, and a ten-year-old boy. Though the spareness of the dialogue can be poetic, in Declan Feenan's writing it is what's going on under the words that carries the emotional charge. His characters talk, often quite volubly, but all we hear is the unbridgeable gap between them – and the evasions and concealments with which they live their lives.
Declan Feenan's play St Petersburg was first performed at the Bush Theatre, London, in October 2008 as the centrepiece to the theatre's Broken Space Season, and was nominated for the 2009 Meyer Whitworth Award.
'John, a retired lorry driver, used to drive into the frozen wastes of eastern Europe, but his relationship with his daughter, Kate, a child conceived in heat, is now blanketed by the permafrost of the past'
Guardian'Vivid... wonderfully lifelike... St Petersburg plays so intimately that you feel like an intruder'
The Times
