Author: chriswood14

Casserole is the first in-house production by theatre Company Actors East. Written by Kate Kelly Flood, James Alexandrou (also the Director), and Dom Morgan. Starring Flood and Alexandrou as Kate and Dom, a couple in a dysfunctional relationship living together somewhere in London. 

Upon entering the theatre prior to the show commencing, we’re greeted with a meticulously designed set of total chaos; a kitchen/lounge/bedroom strewn with cans of Red Stripe, pizza boxes, and dirty plates that looked as though it had played host to a party the night before. Alexandrou’s character is already present on the set as the audience filter into the room, wallowing in the filth he’s created, occasionally moving to smoke or put food in the microwave – doing an excellent job of giving us some prior context into the emotional state his character is in. Credit to set designers Paulina Camacho and Paul Weedle for creating such a beautiful, disgusting mess. 

Casserole takes place over one evening, in Kate and Dom’s flat. The plot centres around the culmination of their failures at processing their own problems. These problems drive a wedge in their relationship that reaches boiling point on the night we’re with them. Kate is grieving the recent loss of her mother, suffering panic attacks in public, and Dom is unemployed, lost without a place in the world, evidently finding it to look after himself. 

Because of this, Casserole is fraught with tension. The script is a near constant stream of sadness, snark, shouting, and the occasional blunt insult. It carries well in the lower tempo moments. In exchanges where the pace picks up, the script suddenly feels a bit bloated, with the characters repeating words of confusion or dismay at each other rather than communicating properly, which feels unrealistic. 

For the most part, Flood and Alexandrou played their parts well. Alexandrou did a good job showing Dom as deflated, foolish, maybe even ignorant, but not quite malicious. Though at the points where conflict was coming to a head, Alexandrou played Dom perhaps with a little too much rage and not quite enough anguish or despair. Flood begins by playing Kate as cold, and a little unkind, but does well to convey the slow unravelling of vulnerability from the grief that Kate is feeling at the loss of a parent. At the end, you’re left pitying both characters, as the closing minutes of the performance involve both characters physically tidying up the big mess that they’ve found themselves with, not saying a word to each other, finally. A poignant closure that felt right, in its ambiguity. 

Journey of a Refugee is an immersive theatre experience directed by Sue Buckmaster, starring Adi Detemo, Mohamed Sarrar, Vivian Triantafyllopoulou, and Kassichana Okene-Jameson, showing at the Stanley Arts Centre in Croydon, as well as some local in-school performances. 

The cast occupy the space in a range of ways in order to facilitate the story of Zain (Sarrar) , a refugee in the UK from Sudan. In order to make this work, the audience are never fixed in one place for very long. We’re herded into a certain part of the room, invited to sit on the floor or stand further back to watch the next scene, before then being moved into a new position, perhaps at a 90 degree rotation, or maybe split up so that the cast are now performing in the middle of the room. This constant movement allows for an inherent variety in the storytelling without needing a larger cast or crew to support with prop or set changes. It also keeps the audience from getting too comfortable, which provides crucial for later on when they kick the immersion up a gear. 

Across each scene, a range of devices are used in order to tell the story, with dialogue often not being relied upon. Instead, Journey of a Refugee prefers to show you the plot using puppetry, dance, and make-shift props, all of which work reasonably well and keep the audience captivated through the continual change. Most impressively was a scene that involved Zain riding in a raft, represented by a line of empty life jackets in a crate, across the Mediterranean, represented by a thin plastic sheet that spanned the stage, being wafted by the other members of the cast. It was a technique that while reminiscent of a child’s birthday party, conveyed the danger in the waves of water surprisingly well. 

Towards the end of the show is when things start to really get immersive. As Ali is attempting to engage with the bureaucracy of the UK’s Asylum Seeking system, the cast seeks to highlight how difficult it is by bringing the whole audience on stage, breaking us into groups, and guiding us through a series of challenges whereby we need to fill in sequential elements of our own asylum seeking paperwork, with enough caveats and hidden pitfalls that suddenly make you feel like you’re participating in an episode of Taskmaster. This was an inventive way to highlight how twisted the Asylum Seeking process can be, whilst also letting the audience have fun. For anyone who cringes at the thought of audience participation, I am normally that person, and I’ll concede that I really enjoyed this. 

It’s easy to come away from Journey of a Refugee with conflicted emotions. The performance ends on such an emotive high note, that one could be forgiven for forgetting that this is satirical of real strife that people experience every day whilst trying to make a better life for themselves in the UK. But that’s not the intention of the show. Journey of a Refugee doesn’t want you to come away feeling sad. It wants you to come away feeling full of warmth and positivity about what providing asylum can mean for people like Ali, and I’m confident it delivers that.

Phillip Ridley’s Leaves of Glass is written to challenge our understanding of the world, where the perception of seeing so much of each other’s lives can lead to the perception that we know so much. Leaves of Glass sets out to usurp expectations and question what we think we know.

We’re introduced to Steven, performed by Ned Costello, as a successful, stoic, albeit tense man in his 30s. Steven can do no wrong in the eyes of his mother, Liz (Kacey Ainsworth). In contrast, Debbie has little patience for Steven’s brother Barry. Barry, (Joseph Potter) introduced as a recently recovered alcoholic with his head in the clouds, hardly able to hold down a job working for Steven’s cleaning company, more focussed on his unlikely ambitions to become an artist. The dynamic is apparently clear. Steven looks after Barry, even if he doesn’t always agree with him. Rounding out the quartet is Debbie, played by Katie Eldred, Steven’s wife. Debbie and Steven’s relationship is introduced as a fairly complex dynamic – we’re made to feel from the start that their relationship has been on the rocks, but surviving. Both parties test each other in early scenes but we’re made to feel like the fights are a fair match. 

The stage is set in the round, with 4 benches arranged in a square being the only mainstay of an otherwise minimal list of props and stage features. Our characters are exposed and vulnerable to prying eyes. We, the audience, feel like we can see everything. But as the play goes on this very understanding is subverted. 

The play runs for a single act, for around 100 minutes – an unusual choice, but one that feels like a stroke of genius upon reflection. At some point during the middle of the play, you find yourself feeling quite confused. The characters begin talking about things that you don’t understand. Scenes that otherwise feel quite out of place from what we’ve seen moments prior leave you scratching your head and wondering ‘Wait, how did we get here?’ This is all by design, and while initially jarring, is in fact brilliantly executed. All of a sudden, Steven’s life is unravelling amongst a myriad of accusations of bad behaviour, and Barry is on the moral high ground, appearing stable, on the brink of a breakthrough with his art career. Costello and Potter combine perfectly as our plot unfolds to show the complex dynamic of two brothers intermittently letting their masks slip to show the scars of the traumas they’ve been through together, or put each other through. The chemistry between the two actors is truly on-point, even demonstrated through some brief but wonderfully choreographed physical scraps. 

The play being a single act wonderfully increases that shift towards intentional confusion. It prevents the play from being split into a ‘before and after’ narrative, and also prevents the audience from having a break to collect their thoughts and share their understanding of what’s going on with their peers during an interval.

The final two scenes are the play’s finest, and where I commend the creative team, and Director Max Harrison. The lights go off and the scene is lit by just a few candles, as one character recounts through a deeply harrowing story from their past that deals the hypothetical killing blow to the audience’s perception of another. The atmosphere and dialogue here is unsettling, but sharp and captivating. Costello and Potter make wonderful use of the space to show their struggles for the control of the narrative. Despite the lights coming on, the final scene is equally as dark as we get our inevitably bitter ending. The sort that stays with you and you think about all the way home.