TV and film writer Paul Andrew Williams makes his stage debut with
Ticking, a
play that seems to take inspiration from Michael Wall's 1986 play
Amongst
Barbarians but then takes its dark theme off into a weirdly domestic direction.
Simon (Tom Hughes) is a middle-class Englishman in his twenties who's been found
guilty of murdering a prostitute in China. He's always protested his innocence but
after four years in a Chinese prison he faces execution by firing squad at midnight.
With a few hours to go and his American lawyer (David Michaels) desperately trying
to get a last-minute reprieve, Simon's parents (Anthony Head and Niamh Cusack)
arrive to spend a final hour with their son. They find him angry and frustrated,
unsurprisingly, but instead of his captors his anger seems to be directed at them,
and especially his father.
