Reviews for Scotch and Water by Brett
C. Leonard and Ponies by Mike Batistick
THE GUARDIAN
“…this American double-bill about New York’s seedy sub-culture… teaches us a vital lesson: we no longer expect drama to offer neat resolutions.
[In] Mike Batistick’s Ponies Simon Holmes gives a fine performance as the bustling Croatian chancer.
[In Scotch and Water] Leonard captures well the slow descent from morning brightness, into afternoon
torpor. Mike Sarne is very convincing as a maudlin, brown-suited boozer and
Laura Brook, as the owner, touchingly suggests the pathos of fading beauty.
Simon de Deney’s production is atmospherically desolate… effective puncturing of the American Dream.”
Michael Billington
Friday 6 August, 2004
TIME OUT (Critic’s Choice)
“Mike Batistick’s sharp-as-a-flick-knife play…
Universally punchy performances make this a funny, compelling watch…
Simon de Deney’s beautifully paced production… squeezes fresh comedy from the consequences of a gunman bursting into the
alcoholic gloom.
A bracingly irreverent, emotionally gripping evening.”
Rachel Halliburton
Tuesday 10 August, 2004
THE INDEPENDENT (Top 5 plays)
…this sharp double bill of one-act dramas about those parts of New York that the
American Dream has overlooked.
Both settings come across with a disconcerting immediacy in Simon de Deney’s atmospheric, well-acted productions. You can almost smell the reek of frantic
hope in the seedy Off-Track betting-shop in Ponies,
Wonderfully played by Simon Holmes with a hunted, manic drive that manages to
seem both monstrous and pathetic, Drazen is a Croatian nobody who longs to be a
big-shot wheeler-dealer.
…the silent, hard-tippling oldster (compellingly played by Mike Sarne).”
Paul Taylor
Thursday 12 August, 2004