A play about inertia that, in its weaker moments, practises what it preaches
There is a particular hazard that attends any play built around the premise that its characters are, by design, difficult to be around. The audience may simply decline the invitation to stick with them, and Kilian King’s Brew Hill, for all its evident ambition, spends a good portion of its fifty minutes daring you to do exactly that.
The set-up has real promise, and the staging commits to it with a single, unmoving image of a couch and nothing much beyond it, since Nat and Gordon are, in the play’s own logic, locked inside their flat for the duration, unable or unwilling to cross the threshold into the world they keep talking about joining. Nat, a recovering alcoholic, has taken to dreaming herself into the crowded carnivalesque world of Pieter Breughel the Elder papering the walls with his prints as her fixation deepens, and has arrived at the conclusion that what she and her flatmate need is to open a brewery together, named, with a pun, Brew Hill. Gordon spends most of his stage time half-dressed on that same couch, glasses pushed up on his head as though a techno club might materialise at any moment and checking flights to Berlin with the glazed look of a man already elsewhere in spirit. He suffers from panic attacks, though the play is so sparing with this information that for long stretches it reads simply as a bad case of Berlin-envy, and by the time the attacks are named outright, the recontextualising jolt they ought to deliver has mostly evaporated. His refusal to so much as look at Nat while she enthuses about Breughel plays, for most of the runtime, as plain rudeness rather than the symptom it’s presumably meant to be.
Around them orbits Kirsty, warmly and sensibly dressed with a sparkling scarf and long skirt, in a way that immediately marks her out as the only person on stage operating in the same decade as the audience and who has been designated, apparently unilaterally, as the living embodiment of “community” itself. Pieter Breughel himself appears intermittently, in Renaissance dress, to deliver monologues from what one assumes is meant to be a kind of authorial remove, with Gordon burrowing beneath the couch blanket each time to clear space for him. These monologues start as charming and wear thin, not helped by transitions that linger too long in the dark.
There is real wit here, and the German-inflected jokes and Breughel projections lend the production a pleasing, slightly unhinged specificity when they’re allowed to breathe. But the piece is simply too short to earn the crisis it hurtles toward in its final minutes, an out-of-nowhere crashout that plays less like culmination than a full stop inserted because the run-time demanded one. Whether two people this committed to never leaving the sofa ever deserved the village they claimed to want is, in the end, a more interesting question than the play seems to realise it’s asking.
Brew Hill’s run at Bread and Roses Theatre, London has now concluded.