Every One

[Shana A]

Every One

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

          o Mark Fisher
          o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 March 2010 22.00 GMT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/mar/23/every-one-review

In the past five years, the author of Every One has lost a wife to a brain tumour, undergone a heart bypass operation, embraced Christianity and become a woman: John Clifford is now Jo Clifford. This upheaval has found expression in her writing, from a translation of Faust to the bereavement-based Leave to Remain. But it is in Every One, an astonishing response to the medieval Everyman, that she processes the trauma of death most profoundly.

This is a high-risk strategy. Every One is an open wound of a play: tender, private and vulnerable. It is protected by a self-deprecating humour and a rhetorical elegance – not to mention a superb production by Mark Thomson – but it is essentially raw and exposed. Clifford is either brave or foolhardy. You'd call her egotistical if there weren't tears rolling down your cheeks.