Peter Quilter is an award winning playwright having previous success with End of the Rainbow, Saving Jason and Glorious. 4000 Days is his comical new play about a man called Michael who, as a result of an accident, suffers from amnesia. He awakes from a 3-week coma and subsequently cannot remember the last decade (4000 days) of his life, thus completely erasing from his memory all knowledge of his partner Paul. What's more, Michael's disapproving mother, Carol, doesn't want him to remember.
Set solely in a hospital room, the play weaves its way around the deeper feelings of the characters, revealing the themes of love triangles, homophobia, lost identity, and control versus freedom. It makes us question how much we compromise of ourselves for the people that we love as our empathy with the different characters changes throughout.
While the suggested playing age for the characters is between 30 and 60 years-old, the play offers many juicy scenes of fractious text which would be well suited to student performers searching for duologues, and can easily be taken out of context from the play to provide material for class or exam work. The dialogue is cleverly written and the characters offer a good starting point for development.
The play certainly has unique ideas for plot, and I will definitely be using extracts with my students in the drama studio. It is great material with much scope for developing good comic performances with some laugh out loud moments.