An amusing series of increasingly irritating decisions around what to do with a corpse
Written and directed by Chess Hayden, Rock, Paper, Scissors stars Emma Lo and Jimmy Roberts, as housemates Lucy and Dylan. They’re joined by Megan Cooper, as Dylan’s ex-girlfriend.
It begins with Dylan and Lucy sitting shell shocked on a sofa, moments after Lucy has pushed her boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend, down the stairs and killed him. Realising the junction that their lives are at, Lucy and Dylan struggle to agree on a way forward, torn between the honest path that will put their own futures in jeopardy, or the more sinister option, of covering the whole thing up and hiding the body,
Rock, Paper, Scissors is one of those stories where the characters act completely irrationally in the name of comedy. A punchy script provided some snappy quips between Lucy and Dylan, balanced with a modest dose of physical comedy based around a dead body. And while I often found myself wanting to groan with frustration with my head in my hands at the series of bad decisions our characters were making, it succeeded in remaining funny enough to make the pain at their actions worthwhile.
Where the play struggled was justifying the ludicrous decisions the characters were making. While a level of irrationality is a given when characters are discussing what to do with a corpse, Lucy’s character, the advocate for the ‘evil path’, often didn’t feel persuasive enough to justify the actions that she was advocating for. The character is freshly out of an abusive relationship, and this could have been drawn upon a little more to help the audience empathise with her. Instead, Lo plays Lucy’s anxiety and stress on a surface level. A desire to stay out of prison is the extent of the arguments made that drives Lucy’s increasingly erratic behaviour. This feels like a missed opportunity to add some emotional edge to contrast the comedy.
To balance Lucy, Roberts’ Dylan, typically the advocate of playing a straight bat, plays his part well as enough of a voice of reason to highlight the nonsense, but sufficiently weak enough to not prevent it entirely, with very subtle and occasional allusions to hidden romantic feelings that, while a bit of a cliché, are passed off well . Rounding the cast off, Cooper does a solid job as Dylan’s irritating ex partner who gets in the way and risks everything unravelling.
Rock, Paper, Scissors does an excellent job of being an amusing 70 minute long experience of watching two friends navigate through a series of increasingly funny but increasingly bad decisions. Where it falls short is adding any further depth to the events unfolding, but that doesn’t take away from it being an enjoyable watch.