24 June – 2 July
As student productions go this was an interesting choice of play. It felt to me like a devised piece and certainly has the freshness of commitment one tends to find when you have total buy-in from the cast. Again, whilst not privileging any particular actor with lead status a number of characters each have their moment in the spotlight, so it certainly makes sense in that respect. However there are down sides to this style of playing.
The script, by Bea Roberts, works as series of comedy sketches around the theme of eco-system collapse and fight-back. Monty Python does The Day of the Triffids – meets – Kafka’s Metapmorphosis you could say. Plant life in its various forms has brought about a pandemic in which human behaviour and anatomy is being changed by unspecified pathogens. In one case a man becomes literally rooted to the spot whilst in another a leading scientist – the government’s chief scientific officer no less – has a conversation and develops a relationship with a woodlouse he digs out of his ear. All good clean absurdist fun.
However, and this brings me to my reservation about the choice for students, the style of production, whilst obviously in the bracket marked ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, fell somewhere between stereotype and parody. The former of these is too easy and doesn’t test an actor’s mettle in creating a rounded character. I’m not going to name names or point fingers as I thought it was something they’d find it hard to avoid given the style of production, but I did find myself inwardly groaning at a set of characters we’ve all seen umpteen times before. That said, there were exceptions, which came as a relief and did give one confidence that there was some genuine talent on display.
Particularly in scenes where there was one to one dialogue we had a sense of developing emotional relationships, albeit in a comedy setting, and characters with some kind of purpose. Which brings me to the second point, that parody, to be successful, needs to be a distortion or exaggeration of something we recognize. In that sense it seemed to me the piece was not quite brave enough.
The settings and use of projections were clear and punchy and allowed the scenes to flow smoothly. Costumes too were of the high standard we’d expect at the Old Vic and gave the actors plenty to work off in terms of characterisation. The woodlouse in particular was a very effective piece of costuming.
On the positive side the show gave the students an opportunity to exercise their skills in a very distinctive style of comedy with an energy and attack that was refreshing in itself.
Graham Wyles 25 June 2022
Photo credit: Craig Fuller
