★★★☆☆
“I will do anything to get what I want,” says 14-year-old Katherine. “You’ve got no idea how far I’ll go.” Soaked to the skin, her hands bleeding, she has broken into the Chicago home of Harrison, a high-school maths teacher, hell-bent on persuading him to accept her into his class. She finds him at crisis point, about to overdose in an attempt to end a life of despair and disappointment. Katherine is unfazed. She has cerebral palsy and is in a wheelchair; she has overcome much trickier obstacles than this.
The author, Athena Stevens, who also plays Katherine in Alex Sims’s production, was herself born with athetoid cerebral palsy. Here, she vividly evokes the experience of living with a disability: the ordinary tasks — opening heavy doors or supermarket shopping — that become challenges, the routine insults to her considerable intelligence, the frustration of negotiating a world in which no one looks her in the eye.
Stevens gives Katherine compelling vitality: she’s opinionated, angry and funny. Harrison (Tim Beckmann) is thinly drawn by comparison, and the drama, as it traces their relationship over a whistle-stop 20 years, feels rather baldly schematic.
Katherine’s indomitable determination contrasts with Harrison’s resignation to bitter compromise: he has allowed his marriage and his dream of becoming an architect to slip through his fingers. So when Katherine successfully pursues the same career ambition, it inevitably puts a strain on what has evolved from a teacher-pupil connection into romantic love. It comes as no surprise to discover who’s the stronger of the two.
The talk-radio interludes that link the scenes are slightly clumsy, but otherwise Sims’s production is deft, with an elegant set by Alex Marker featuring architectural drawings and calculations, pointing up the practical problem-solving that is as much a feature of Katherine’s daily existence as it is of her work. This is not a piece without flaws, but its gutsy heroine is hard to resist.
Box office: 0844 8471652, to May 14