Most Heartbreaking Plays

Things I know to be true by Andrew Bovell recently at the Lyric Hammersmith left me in floods of tears. I think it was a combination of both writing and production too.

Blanche’s fate at the end of Streetcar immediately comes to mind

I’ll second Bent. I saw Alan Cummings in it at the Tradalgar Studios many years ago and was struck silent for about two hours afterwards.

Yerma.

Pretty much anything by Chekhov at some point in his plays, much of Our Town, if we are looking at writing on its own.

Looking beyond just the writing, the wider theatrical experience counts for a lot. A piece by the Polish Company Teatr Zar, for example, following in the footsteps of the great director Grotowski, called Gospels of Childhood. In three parts, the first and last in a church (next to the Barbican) and the middle one in The Pit. Highly spiritual, singing in the beautiful full throated Eastern European style, highly stylised symbolic movement, ritualistic, sublime. Others in that vein would include moments in shows by very visual theatremakers where text and image and sound gel perfectly, Mnemonic or other multi-narrative shows by Complicite, much by Punchdrunk when things are serendipitously revealed, Irish company Dead Centre (Lippy, as seen at the Young Vic, a Lynchian dream of a show about the mystery of a family’s self starvation, for example), Installation artist Geraldine Pilgrim who infuses her work with the details of the places she takes over, populated with performers and memories.

Then there are the storytellers, those whose individual presence gives a very direct conduit to their emotional world. Kitson, as already mentioned, Kate Tempest’s solo shows, the scatological Kim Noble whose shock value is often just the precursor to a revalation about the terror and/or beauty of humanity.

One moment sticks out, from a verbatim piece at the BAC called London Stories, people telling their own stories, singly, in different spaces around the building, with a small number of audience members at a time. One story by an older African lady, devastated by war and loss, ending in hugs and tears.

Real stories, made up stories, words, images, sounds.

Heartbreaking long term, or moving and tear to the eye short term or both? The Weir for me is heartbreaking. The Three Sisters is heartbreaking. Hamlet breaks my heart. For me it is the waste, loss and the inescapable grief. There was a tear in my eye at the end of Oslo for the lost opportunity described there but as a whole play, not quite crafted enough to be up there with the best. I always thought Hare was getting somewhere with Plenty for heartbreaking waste of a person. And of course Stoppard's Arcadia and The Invention of Love, both masterpieces imo.

Constellations at the RC Upstairs has been the only one I’ve been completely poleaxed by, and that’s probably in part because I learned that a good friend was seriously ill the day I saw it. The themes of the play just shot right through me.

Otherwise, agree on Holding the Man. I didn’t expect to be as affected by Revlon Girl as I was. My husband is part Welsh and of the same age as many of the children who lost their life, and I could sense him really struggling to keep control. And I could tell in the tiny space above the Park Theatre he wasn’t the only one. Also recently, Play Something at last year’s Fringe had me unexpectedly sobbing quietly for most of the final 20 minutes.

Have to add The Inheritance if that hasn't already been mentioned.