Scenes From the Big Picture

We see a day in the life of over twenty inhabitants of the district as their stories interweave and collide

In a tour de force of dramatic writing, a whole world is evoked in a couple of hours

'The Northern Irish dramatist Owen McCafferty was one of the brightest discoveries of the National Theatre's Transformation season of new writing last year, and his promise is magnificently confirmed here

This stirringly ambitious piece is an epic that attempts to put the whole of life on stage - birth, death, love, sex, work, families, the whole damn thing

McCafferty is a writer of depth and subtlety, as well as palpable humanity, and constantly confounds the audience's expectations

His characterisation is detailed, vivid and unpredictable, his dialogue pungent, and the piece constantly combined raw drama with quirky humour

REVIEWS

"... a more or less perfect play" ~ Financial Times

"Certain key ideas emerge strongly, too - about the control, or lack of it, that we have over our own lives, about the way most of us contain a mixture of good and bad" ~ Daily Telegraph

"An impressively panoramic portrait of a day in the life of Belfast ... McCafferty's ability to show not just the way individual lives intersect, but the collision of private and public worlds, is striking" ~ Guardian

"An amazingly well-acted and complex, poetic play, set on the streets of Belfast. The director is Peter Gill, and his work is simply breathtaking ... The play has an irresistible musical momentum and a quality of surprise that continuously transfixes the action in another dimension of reality" ~ Daily Mail

"Stunning ... throughout two and a half hours of mesmerising theatre, what emerges is that in most respects Belfast is no different to any other place... the crises here are universal. Writer McCafferty's excellent work is made all the more gripping by some of the best acting I have seen in a long while" ~ Daily Mirror