David Spencer

Presse und Rezension: Daily Mail Time Out The Times Listener What’s on The Independent Aufführungen: Royal Court Upstairs for Soho Theater Company Sprachen: Englisch Deutsch

Date: 09/13/1990 Author: Georgina Brown David Spencer’s Killing the Cat explores the repercussions for a working-class family when the son writes a novel exposing his father’s sexual abuse of his daughter. It is Spencer’s second winner of the Verity Bargate Award for new writers and an exceptional piece – dense, demanding and boldly conceived, and [...]

Killing the Cat is a play about memory and writing. Moving between the 70s and the present day it shows Danny writing about his sister’s experience of sexual abuse by his father. As he invents a fiction of what he has been told has happened, what he remembers happening and what he imagines or dreams [...]

Date: 09/19/1990 Author: John Marriot Focus on a family at war Blessed by David Spencer’s lean script which ensures that anger bounces off the walls of this tiny venue with full force, this impressive piece links family break-up to social unrest, and provides meaty roles for an excellent cast. Centering on the uneasy introspection of [...]

Date: 08/31/1990 Author: Harry Eyres David Spencer has written a play about the noxious effects of child abuse, which is notable for the absence of campaigning rhetoric and accusing fingers, and in which the social services are never mentioned. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is concerned with the breakdown of [...]

Date: 09/08/1990 Author: Matt Wolf What increasingly seems to be the Royal Court’s house style – short, sharp plays written in jagged, non-naturalistic stabs – is reinvigorated in David Spencer’s “Killing the Cat” (Theatre Upstairs), the Soho Theatre Company offering that won this year’s Verity Bargate award. Spencer lives in Berlin, but his play returns [...]

Date: Dale Arden Author: 09/05/1990 “Killing the Cat” opens with a fragmented sequence of moments from a family’s history, past and present. Although the links between the fragments at first seem obscure, each moment has perfect emotional clarity. The effect is kaleidoscopic, as little shards of atmosphere, each one razor sharp at the edges, gradually [...]

Date: 09/05/1990 Author: James Christopher David Spencer’s award winning play, full of tense, inarticulate aggression, examines the corrosive legacy of sexual abuse as seen through the eyes of a young playwright, Danny, whose almost perverse determination to exhume his working-class family’s murky past rubs abrasively against their wishes. If the main dynamic is Danny’s quest [...]