Jonathan Gems: Three Plays

Susan’s Breasts ‘Gems’s piece is a bitter dissection of the heroin generation, where bright young things attempt to maintain their rigid codes of personal freedom and loveless sex … Sparky, sexy, sterile Susan is the object of Gems’s despair, and the object of desire for her predatory he-admirers – a loutish intellectual, a wise-cracking, good-time restaurateur, and a fi lm-maker with acute semiotics-disease. It is only the old-fashioned romantic love professed by Lemon, a Romeo-cum-seer, which makes the eponymous breasts swell with maternity. Sharply observed and often carrying a charge of rich comic irony.’ – Time Out Naked Robots ‘An extremely well-written evocation of life in the style-conscious world of popular music.’ – The Sunday Times The Paranormalist ‘The climax of The Paranormalist has Denholm Elliott in spotlit levitation above a bickering family in a suburban living room. Dishevelled in baggy cardy and slippers, Elliott gives an affectionate and authoritative portrayal as an English eccentric. It’s a brilliant performance in an exhilarating new play which interweaves drawing-room farce with a witty use of the paranormal.’ – Ann McFerran, Time Out