REVIEW: Life With Oscar

Entering Arcola Theatre’s downstairs studio, Nick Cohen greets us as we make our way to our seats. He is asks us what we are nominated for, what category our potential win might be in, commenting on how strong our fictional competition might be. This interaction catches some audience members off guard in a humorously awkward exchange and generally creates an amusing atmosphere to start the evening off with. Based on these interactions, it might be presumed that the play itself will be framed as a night at the Oscars. Once the show ‘officially’ begins, however, our position as Oscar nominees is never again referenced or clarified. It is the first of a few confusing aspirations that the show had to offer. 

Written and performed by Nick Cohen, Life with Oscar is an autobiographical one-man show in which Cohen plays a dizzying 29 different characters over the course of 70 minutes. The show focuses on his time living in Los Angeles and his manic desire for an Oscar. It is chronological: we begin with his childhood and life in London. His parents are offered as people who desired celebrity and failed to achieve it, who in turn bestowed that desire upon their child, with ever more fervour. Though he describes himself as not a nepo baby, but rather a ‘repo’ baby (a definition of which was not easily extrapolated from the play itself), through his father’s connections he nevertheless ends up living rent-free in Los Angeles with a film director who has been awarded not one, but two glorious Oscars. So begins the tale of the underbelly of Los Angeles. Cohen guides us through his discovery of the sinister inner workings of the land of the glimmering film industry. The beating heart of Hollywood is inspected and dissected and shown for what it really is – hedonist, and not the fun kind. Eventually, after failing time and time again to get his film off the ground, and finding himself sick of pandering to people whose code of ethics is questionable at best, Nick returns to London. 

Life with Oscar has a lot of promise: it has the shock-factor of a gritty drama, balanced out by the authenticity of lived experience. Some of the writing teeters on self-indulgent and disordered, similarly reflected in the performance. It is an admirable challenge to play such a large and varied number of characters, the complexity of which was at times distracting. Nevertheless, the piece was engaging and stirring to watch, and made for an entertaining evening out.