New Writing Week – New Theatre – Review by Stephen McDermott

Drawing Dusty Crosses on a Windowpane

You can sing to remember what’s gone, we’re told at the outset of Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane, to save it from becoming lost. But for the play’s anonymous protagonist, no remembrance hymn can bring back what time has taken.

A young woman (Claire Galvin) reflects upon the story of her uncle, beginning at his untimely death and returning intermittently to his life as her monologue progresses. In a nostalgic stream-of-consciousness, she attempts to figure out who her uncle was and what their relationship means now that he’s gone.

It’s a similar problem faced by the audience, with the subtle form of Dylan Coburn-Gray’s well-crafted script at times difficult to pin down. This is perhaps because the play is presented as a reading as part of The New Theatre’s New Writing week.

But even then, its style remains a little off-centre – even for a play reading. The substance of a dramatic narrative is there, and yet the play takes the form of a series of thoughts rather than a conventional plot structure.

The protagonist reads from a script that isn’t quite verse or prose, but still has a musical feel to it. Absences and allusions are punctuated throughout the dialogue, with an uncertainty as to the form the protagonist’s thoughts take. Is she mourning or looking forward?

Coburn-Gray’s clever use of language also allows these mediations to become thematically and stylistically interwoven, with losses of meaning retained in a kind of linguistic afterlife. Teenagers are referred to as “not-children”, and at one point her uncle’s racial tolerance is called “anti-anti-Semitism”.

At times, it can be difficult to unlock the play’s textual nuances and grasp what’s going on with so much focus on what’s being said. The result is that its stream-of-consciousness arc doesn’t allow for the same level of catharsis as a conventional narrative might allow for.

But despite this, or perhaps because of it, the piece thrives in the moments where the language is allowed to blossom. Images and metaphors abound in a way that makes the whole thing more poetic than dramatic, though it never falls into self-indulgent territory.

Ultimately, the action that is lost is recovered by the way the piece plays with the mind of its audience.