Raymond Watkiss is not a name you would recognise. Watkiss had few family members, even fewer friends and was never famous, so why is his story so important to tell? It is this which is the central focus for promising new verbatim work, Ray.
The piece is threaded together by Ray’s youngest relative (Emily Lucy Jones), who serves as the interviewer quizzing three elder relations about Ray, his life, and their relationship with him. It becomes clear that despite their love and affection for Ray, the three knew very little about him beyond just superficial details, such as his nickname ‘Buncle’, or his passion for gin.
Yet it is those superficial details, those sweet, inoffensive memories, which make this verbatim work one full of poignancy and full of potential too. It is the play’s focus on stories, and the stories we can tell of those we have lost, and that we can share with our loved ones, which keep the memories of those gone alive. In this sense, Ray achieves this well, bringing to the fore a sense of identity and personality that was otherwise unknown.
But, in contrast, the manner with which some of the play is delivered can be a little disconnecting. The decision to keep in the stammers and pauses by the three performers (Isabel Pearl-Martin, Eleanor Barclay and Alice Crisp) is a neat choice and works successfully to fully immerse the audience in this family reminiscing over the past. However, lines are delivered from scripts on notebooks and tablets, a noble directorial decision from Alice Fenton which enables the words of Ray’s family to be precisely delivered, but it does distract a little nevertheless.
The piece’s set design is full of neat nods to Ray’s life too, with his records, odd collections of bottletop lids and alcohol bottles covering the floor. With the records, some of these underscore the scene changes, but there is more scope to explore some of these mementoes as stories themselves, perhaps with a little more investigation and questioning with Ray’s family to maintain the verbatim concept.
Nevertheless, there is a great deal of promise in Ray. Jones’s role as the interviewer teases at something bigger, where her character aligns with Ray’s difficulties in self-acceptance, and the trio of performers alongside her work hard to capture the essence of these real-life individuals. While some of the voiceovers lack clarity in terms of who they are, Ray does a terrific job in painting an image of a man whom everybody in the family knew, but did not really know.
The frustration is that, with Ray’s death, some stories won’t ever be finished.
