An acclaimed trilogy of plays exploring the impact of war on ordinary lives.
In Being Friends, two young men meet in a Kentish field in 1944 as doodlebugs whizz overhead. One is a conscientious objector, the other an artist, but an intense bond forms between them.
In Lost, May Appleton, whose son is serving in the Falklands, receives the visit that every mother dreads.
In Making Noise Quietly, set in 1986 in the Black Forest, a German businesswoman takes into her home a fugitive British private and his disturbed stepson.
Robert Holman’s trilogy of short plays, collectively called Making Noise Quietly, was first performed at the Bush Theatre, London, in June 1986. It was revived by the Oxford Stage Company at the Whitehall Theatre, London, in April 1999 following a UK tour. It received a major revival at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in April 2012.
‘A supreme example of how a writer can make a play by putting together a triptych of miniatures… Writing of rare sensitivity and cumulative power’
— Independent
‘The modern school of in-yer-face theatrical brutality often boasts of ‘exploring the dark side’. Holman, without crude shock tactics, really does so. And goes directly to the heart’
— The Times
‘Marvellous… this haunting trilogy lodges itself in the mind and heart far more deeply than many noisier, flashier plays’
— Daily Telegraph
‘Charming, funny and faultless… a minor miracle’
— Observer
‘Holman’s instinct for truth, and an unaffected ability to spot what’s poignant in it, is what one remembers: that, and a paradoxical impression of spare richness, astringent abundance’
— The Times
