Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Samuel Nicholas, Solomon Israel, Michelle Asante.
By talking we are able to express our emotions, our fears, our doubts and concerns with greater clarity than we ever can by the silence that surrounds us. At times though grief is so overpowering that the simple things like laughter, joy and love can only be shown by the quiet and hushed up screams. The internal rage and sorrow of loss can only ever be expressed by non verbal communication and it affects us more than we realise.
In Natalie Ibu’s touching and emotive play I Know All The Secrets In My World, grief is such an abiding force that the two men on stage playing father and son, Samuel Nicholas and Solomon Israel, need no words for virtually the whole performance. As it is always a pleasure to admire an actor who can do a monologue for an hour, to bask in the ability to remember a few thousand words with no prompt from another on stage, so it is to relish in an actor’s capacity to be on stage and keep an audience mesmerised without uttering a single word for almost an hour.
Words are power but sometimes they remain inert, meaningless, unable to ever capture in true definition the hurt we feel when someone close to us, someone that makes us belong, passes away. Death is a release to which even words between father and son cannot pass.
Natalie Ibu captures this world, a world in which words which once flowed freely, in which father and son were more like best friends than they were adult and child, have become signals in which the days pass, the desire is there but the ability to be able to converse at the same time is beyond them; the world has become a place in which actions are mundane. It takes a very good writer to be able to convey that sense of the dramatic in a script, it takes two actors of outstanding aptitude to perform the sequences at hand.
A play of great strength which never for one minute releases its grip on the audience’s attention, I Know All The Secrets In My World is a play of great belief and resonance.
Ian D. Hall