“Art and the artificial clash in a sweet, deftly executed friend-com about a duo’s complex struggle for authenticity and connection in a superficial industry.“
Charting the length of a US stadium tour, Meg Schadler’s Green traces the evolving relationship between acoustic singer-songwriter Jude (Matthew Heywood) and self-identifying ‘nepo-baby’ Zoe (Noa Nikita Bleeker), through the centrifugal space of the Green Room. Jude is a wide-eyed dreamer, pulled from relative obscurity as the tour’s opener in an implied seduction by superstar headliner Ben (an unseen spectre in the piece and ultimately an elegant synecdoche for superstardom itself). Zoe is a celebrity-native, the daughter of two legendary artists and along for the ride as Ben’s ‘girlfriend’ – a relationship she admits is a sham confected by their respective PR teams to build a sense of Ben’s sexual ambiguity. Each has their own relationship with artistry and fame; each is in love with Ben in their own way. As Zoe’s mercenary disillusionment grates against Jude’s commitment to authentic expression, each confronts the collision of art and reality while finding common ground in the struggle.
Green is often wandering through the supermarket aisles of decades of folk-rock mythology, picking out its favourite contemporary-coded treats. That heavy familiarity is either going to be heartwarming or a stone in your shoe, depending on your disposition. The title is triple-barrel wordplay – youth and naiveté, jealousy, the liminality of the green room itself – which all swirl around the characters throughout. The set makes an eye-catching move, with the key playing-space delineated by a stark hexagonal patch of white flooring against the studio-black beyond. To underline it, this razor-line also slices through the furniture that happens to be set along its edge. It’s a clever move, honing-in on the piece’s preoccupation with dichotomies: public and private, sincere and cynical, heart on your sleeve or in an iron chest. The lighting pushes in this direction as well, vacillating between the blandness of the green room and a gentle blend of purple and blue, evoking both the megastadium theatricality of their touring routine and its ecstatic solipsism. The sound does solid work catapulting us between scenes – even if the transitions occasionally feel like they’re treading water, unsure as to the work they’re supposed to be doing in the flow of the show.
Generally though, Benedict Esdale’s direction is crisp and dynamic, nailing the tonal beats and keeping things emotionally attuned. The actors are a lovely pairing, with an easy and infectious warmth that understands the text’s needs. Heywood in particular puts in a wonderful turn here, breaking out the guitar, the piano, his vocal talents, and deftly charting Jude’s fractious path through the tour. Pulling all this off with the depth, skill and perspicacity he does is a minor miracle in of itself, and a credit to the entire team. The songs also do some heroic work in the piece, entirely earning it the moniker of a ‘play with music’ where so often the latter feels merely gestural. Schadler and songwriter Stamatis Seraphim have a canny knack for using their tunes to wrench the emotional and thematic currents of the moment down to a sharp point, which usually pierces through.
However, where Jude’s conflict and journey are clear and the stakes appropriately visceral, Zoe feels muddy by comparison. The script keeps showing us that she’s a conflicted figure, torn between a yearning for authenticity and a learned-cynicism, but she too often scans as a slightly flat mouthpiece for gauche pragmatism: a foil for Jude’s romantic sensibility. That said, Nikita Bleeker has enough intuition with the repartee, rip and rhythm of the text that she’s still eminently believable, charismatic and watchable.
Green’s insights into the art-as-capital machine and the Fame-Monster aren’t particularly revelatory, and they’re mapped a little too neatly onto aesthetic binaries that disproportionately hallow the soulful lad with his guitar who’s singing – gah! – love songs. But when it settles as an earnestly sweet, smile-jerking vignette of two people thrown into a common space, trying to speak to and see one another, it’s snappy and endearing. Beyond that, the piece manages to pull a late-stage deepening of its ideas in its coda. In post-tour life, Jude is playing an intimate set in a more low-key venue. Esdale has him right downstage, up on a suitcase in front of us. “I’ve been playing pretty big venues lately,” he tells us. “But you know… I kinda prefer the smaller crowds.” It doubles as an affirmation of small-theatre as such, suggesting art as primarily an act of speaking as directly and authentically as possible to another person. Taken on its own terms, Green makes you believe it. Catch Green until 14th June at The Old Red Lion Theatre, tickets are available here.