NT’s The Confessions is a clever consideration of an ordinary life – review
Where to start with a show like The Confessions? It’s far from a conventional play – we’re not here to see a straightforward story, a snapshot into a moment in time with everything nicely wrapped up two hours later.
Instead, The Confessions is based on the life of Alice, who is the mother of the play’s writer Alexander Zeldin. We’re essentially navigating her life story here, told from the moment she graduates high school in Australia in 1943 through to a near present-day London.
Alice considers herself to have lived an ordinary, unremarkable life; The Confessions explores the idea that everybody has a story worth sharing.
The result is a play that is both intimate and epic. All of the action – with a couple of notable exceptions – feels somewhat pedestrian, almost mundane: the majority of scenes play out in kitchens, dining rooms and living rooms in Alice’s various abodes through the decades.
