8 – 10 June

Another memorable brace of plays produced by the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s graduating actors, directors, designers as well as technical and creative students, confirms this, their summer season, as one of the country’s annual dramatic arts highlights. The bar has been set as high as one would wish for for these newly qualifying professionals – the results were there for us all to enjoy.  

In 2016, playwright Brad Birch was awarded the Harold Pinter Commission at the Royal Court where he was to write his play The Brink on secondment. “For me” he says, “as a member of the audience, I don’t always go to watch stories that make me laugh or make me feel happy. There are many plays that are sad and complex,” he says. “They are still a good experience, and that’s what I want for my audience.”

That was certainly true of his play, the first of tonight’s performances, in which a teacher struggles emotionally with the meanings and consequences of a recurring nightmare that foretells an existential threat to both the establishment he works for, and his own mental health. The play’s hook lies firmly between those two anchor points.

Samuel Bell plays Mike, your everyday teacher who slowly begins to unwind as he is haunted by the terrors of a vision of what is to come. Bell brings the role to a slow boil throughout a scintillating 90-minute performance before taking it rightfully over the top in a dramatic show of sustained paranoia and bamboozlement in which the audience is challenged to find sympathy and or horror in his trajectory. Lurking in the school corridors is head teacher Mr Boyd. Tommy McAteer presents a tight-lipped ‘company man’ who definitely doesn’t want the boat rocked by Mike’s ‘ravings’. There is something of a nod to John Cleese in McAteer’s delivery that gets him a lot of laughs. Ellie Jack plays fellow teacher Chloe, who expertly steers a treacherous course between support for Mike, before delivering an alarming volte-face. Doubling as gauche teenager Jessica, Jack with Mira Edirisingha who plays fellow student Jo, and McAteer who doubles as student Martin, successfully build up a sense of the school community and give an edge to student-teacher relationships.

Daniel Preciado’s direction ensured a high tempo for the full 90-minutes, integrating closely with designer Marta Sitarz’s clever use of three bookcases that come apart to imply the explosive splits in the plot, together with Marcus Jarman’s atmospheric lighting and Ebony Hayes’ sometimes sinister soundscape.

Marius Von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One was the second of tonight’s two plays. In this witty satirical production that has echoes of Shelley’s Frankenstein and Shaw’s Pygmalion, our hero Lette, played by the very watchable Christopher Williams, is a brilliant technician responsible for bringing the world beating 2CK Connector into the world. Trouble is, and strange that he has never come to realise it before, he has an unspeakably ugly face. What should have been his career-defining moment is shattered when his boss Scheffler, played with uber confidence by Sumāh Ebelé pulls the rug beneath his feet by inviting Lette’s assistant Karlmann, (Kerr Louden), who can hardly contain himself for glee, to deliver the all-important sales pitch to a waiting conference. Thunderstruck, the wounded Lette confronts his wife Fanny, (Kate Cartwright). Why hadn’t she said anything before? Was their’s merely an ‘acoustic relationship’?

Lette, in considerable distress, submits to the attentions of a cosmetic plastic surgeon, also played by Ebelé, for a complete facial refiguration. The unexpectedly positive results are enough to propel him into PR stardom. A man condemned by his former ugliness has suddenly become a sex god! Williams gloriously transforms his role from geeky tech man into swaggering gigolo. There follows some delightfully witty direction here from Natalie Simone who turns the cast into preening, pouting sexy things posing up as the studio umbrella lights pop around them. Lette, festooned in a mauve boa is now the object of all desire – notably the attentions of the septuagenarian executive director of NucleaArctic (doubled hilariously by Cartwright) and her gay son (doubled by Louden). Scheffler his boss urges him to indulge in sexual favours to promote sales of the connector. Cartwright’s unapologetically steamy exec and her mummy’s boy were a big hit with the audience – and their impressively sharp shifts between roles gave the narrative great pace.

With the story now centred around the prowess of the surgeon – Lette is reduced to becoming an advertising icon for the company, his face a brand in its own right, while his assistant starts to do the hard graft on newer versions of the connector. Suddenly more and more men are appearing with the same face, till, in a climax of narcissism, Lette and lookalike embrace, swallowed up in a demonstration of unbridled self-love. But if all are the same, then value is belittled, identity lost. Lette desperately wants his old face, his old self back. From beast to beauty, he looks for a return. Von Mayenburg teases us with the allure and politics of good looks but reminds us that as individuals we have more worth in our unconventionality.

Simply staged by designer Vyshnavi Krishnan with just two white backcloths, a square box table with a bowl of fruit and a couple of photography studio lights, and given wonderful energy and pace by director Natalie Simone in the intimacy of the Wardrobe Theatre, this production, like The Brink before it had an enthusiastic crowd on its feet at the end.

★★★★☆  Simon Bishop, 9 June 2023

Photo credit: Craig Fuller