Author: James Christensen

James is a director, deviser, writer, researcher and sound designer from Melbourne – but he's been in Australia for the past 5 years. His critical work has been predominantly in the field of experimental performance, with a focus on Postdigital hybridity, ethics, and representations of trauma in live performance disciplines. As an artist, his work has spanned fields as diverse as classical adaptation, new writing, opera, musical and gig theatre, devised performance, and installation art. He holds a BA (Hons) in English and Theatre from the University of Melbourne, a Diploma of Music (Performance) from the Melbourne Conservatorium, and an MFA Advanced Theatre Practice from Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

REVIEW: One Man Poe

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Rating: 4 out of 5.

Stephen Smith wrestles with a trio of spooky tales from the original goth-in-chief, clearing a few stumbling blocks to deliver a gleeful homage to all things murder and mayhem.

‘Nervous!’ declares our narrator upon rising from his pre-show state of mute mental anguish. ’Very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?’ And here we are in Edgar Allen Poe’s world: where sanity and safety are fleeting memories, and darkness reigns supreme. Actor-director Stephen Smith takes on three short tales – The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Raven – in an endurance blitz that goes for the nerves and sets its sights on dragging us into as palpable a rendering of the Poeverse as it can.

Smith has immediately made a striking gambit with this theatricalisation, cleaving meticulously to Poe’s language for the piece’s dialogue, and – as far as I could divine – leaving the tales entirely unedited and unredacted. “I honoured the texts as one would Shakespeare’s,” he avows in the director’s notes, along with his intention to deliver them “as faithfully as can be.” Setting aside the question of who ‘one’ is in this figuration – or if strict adherence is the only or best way a text can be honoured – it’s clear that One Man Poe is, at heart, a celebration and a veneration, over and above any sort of distinctive rearticulation of the author’s ideas and imagery. Smith is operating in the anti-mode of Mike Flanagan, whose modernised melange of Poeian characters and tropes The Fall of the House of Usher hit Netflix a couple of years back.

But what’s surprising in some ways is that it’s precisely this straightforward, devotional angle of approach that becomes perhaps the triptych’s greatest strength. It’s so obvious throughout every moment of One Man Poe that Smith just really, really loves this stuff. He dives into these maniacal, tortured, haunted characters with the electric verve of a D&D Dungeon Master with a huge budget and no day job. The elasticity of his vocal and facial work has a welcome dynamism, and he has a natural ease with the text that makes the whole evening fluent and extremely watchable. Shades of each of these characters can be a little overcooked and grotesque; the narrator in The Tell-tale Heart invites us to “observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story”, but Smith’s seething, twitching (undeniably entertaining) eccentrics don’t leave much madness to the imagination. He also makes a serious misstep in the rendering of The Raven’s grief-addled narrator, leaning far too heavily into a decrepit-old-man caricature, and stripping the poem of some of its eerie solemnity.

Technical elements in the piece are executed with deft aplomb. Lighting (uncredited in the programme, but likely by the Jack’s theatre manager Karl Swinyard) is brash, lush and unsettling all at once. He makes shadows as much a feature of the images as light, offsetting velveteen purples and blues with creeping dark – all through the luxurious density of macabre haze effects. Joseph Furey and Django Holder’s sound design is sculpted and fine-tuned to perfection, with a puckish humour to its rhythm that breathes in tempo with the performance; the spatial mixing is particularly clever and cunningly handled – it’s enough to make you shiver or chuckle in its own right. Furey also gets latitude to stretch out into some expansive music, which is gorgeously composed (some minorly kitschy horns notwithstanding). The set is a peculiar element to consider here: a bulky collection of furniture items is bundled off to the side of the space, the facsimile of an austere 1800s sitting-room. But it’s rarely engaged with at all by Smith, aside from once as a temporary seat and sporadically as a repository for props, which makes it a little vexing to parse in the fabric of the performance beyond a spectral evocation of the author’s own habitus.

But here’s the main hitch: Smith’s obeisance to Poe’s original text necessarily positions the whole performance (sometimes generatively, sometimes tenuously) somewhere between a radio-play/audio-book and a stage adaptation. While the author’s prolixity is undoubtedly an engine of excitement, it also manifests in performance as an abundance of verbiage, which occasionally forces Smith into a dramaturgical corner (pit?) wherein the theatre of it all sort of… freezes. And we’re left only with a rousing dramatic recitation of a short story in relative stasis. These are the sequences in which the show suddenly feels as though it’s treading water for a while, waiting for the script to reach a point that the team felt could be rendered as a holistic theatricalised moment. 

Granted: it’s a finicky point to make, given the high degree of difficulty here and the reality that one story involves the narrator being literally strapped to a table for a large portion of it. Lucky thing then that, overwhelmingly, Smith’s gusto, tactility, energy, mnemonic gymnastics and – yes – love are enough to keep us along for the ride. It’s good, clean, spooky fun, and a crisp night at the theatre.

REVIEW: Storms, Maybe Snow

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Rating: 2 out of 5.

Erstwhile dextrously-written and snappy family drama takes a mid-way veer into melodramatic indulgence – for the worse.

Miranda Lapworth’s Storms, Maybe Snow is built on familiar but time-tested foundations. When we meet them, retired couple Lou and Jack Morley are at a crossroads. They’ve arrived at their seaside home not for a summer sojourn, but for a more permanent beachfront convalescence for Lou in response to a worrying diagnosis. They’re facing up to this new phase of their lives and working out how to chart a course through its destabilising influence on their relationship. Into the picture comes their daughter Mariana (Marnie to her Dad), with whom Lou has a tumultuous relationship, and Marnie’s girlfriend Isobel – a heart-of-gold musician. The coordinates are established for familial turmoil in the face of irrevocable change, all set to the tune of snappy repartee and wistful meditations on life, death, parenthood and marriage. 

Considering Storms, Maybe Snow as a whole is something of a challenge, not least because the piece feels almost perfectly cleaved into two discreet sections. The first act is a largely fluid and engaging bourgeois family drama. As played by Jenny Lloyd-Lyons and Neil Sellman (a consistently endearing and intuitive performance), Lou and Jack trade witticisms, quote Tennyson poems (Mariana’s namesake as it happens), and spar with encyclopedia indices courtesy of their frequent rounds of ‘film relay’. Theirs is a marriage now governed by rhythms, habits and, most importantly, rules: which bags of mints are meant for the house, and which for the car; who’s participating in their word-games correctly; who should cook and when. Transpiring against the show’s handsome set, which is genuinely successful in evoking not only the verisimilitudes of a seaside home, but equally the subtle shades of the inhabitants’ contributions to it, it’s a plausible vision of a relationship cresting on its twilight. Lapworth’s dialogue is self-consciously literary, but has an ample sense of rhythm and play – and the cast meet her with their performances, which are spritely in rhythm and responsiveness. That pithy momentum endures with Marnie and Isobel’s appearance for Jack’s birthday, a sequence that retains its sharp ear for conversational musicality.

Problems inhere, without a doubt: the sound design is baffling, with the exact same piece of GarageBand MIDI-Jazz playing no less than three separate times diegetically, and clunky leveling of omnipresent waves/rain sounds that becomes irksome. Inconsistent miming is distracting – some liquids are there, others are not; some food is there, some is invisible. But more crucially, as the Act carries on and the casual domestic banter continues to unspool, the whole endeavour begins to feel more and more thin. The exact coordinates of Lou and Marnie’s relationship are kept needlessly vague; we’re told they despise one another, but it’s hard to divine or observe exactly why, beyond the provision of some airy (if elegantly-put) aphorisms about relationships between mothers and daughters. Any dramatic conflict or agonism in Jack and Lou’s response to the latter’s diagnosis isn’t really fleshed-out, which makes the illness itself begin to feel narratively insubstantial. Chekhovian metaphors and pathetic fallacies proliferate (a neighbour’s boisterous dog on the beach, the titular storms) but they never seem to lead anywhere. We are waiting for the engine to kick in: the subterranean revelations lurking beneath the throb of middle-class domesticity.

And then, right before intermission, the play effectively drives itself off a cliff in a scene so bizarrely paced and organised in its logic that, with reflection, it is nonsensical from any dramaturgical angle. It’s tricky to go into microscopic detail about Storms, Maybe Snow‘s latter half without inadvertently spoiling the play’s narrative detour. But what essentially remains is an extraordinarily protracted 90 minutes of drawn-out trauma exploitation. The dramaturgy almost seems to collapse in on itself, its endless series of lengthy confessional monologues and peculiar soliloquising punctuated by clunky confrontations and awkwardly-rendered spiritual encounters that strain credulity. The breaches in continuity also worsen, and are too profuse to enumerate. Marnie and Isobel come to the fore in this later stretch, and Steph Sarrat and Sarah Cameron-West are fighting for their lives with these scenarios, putting in overtime trying to generate clear intention from the muddle. In Marnie, Sarrat has a particular struggle. Where in the first act she seemed benignly petulant, her filial hectoring here becomes wantonly vicious, with so little substantive provocation that she appears practically psychopathic. It’s all Sarrat (clearly a very capable, deeply-felt performer) can do to make her a baseline sympathetic person, no matter how many tell-us-how-you-feel monologues she’s furnished with.

The two halves are ostensibly connected by a maternal reconciliation arc, but really it feels as though the play just ran out of places to go and decided to tread water for an hour and a half. The threads and teased metaphors that do pay off by the end aren’t sufficiently developed to deliver the cohesion that the play so desperately needs.
I’d struggle to identify more than a few narrative or emotional gestures in the second half of Storms, Maybe Snow that feel truly authentic or earned. It’s a serious misstep, and squanders a good cast and the talents of an articulate, highly literate playwright in the service of melodramatic excess.

REVIEW: Ghost from a Perfect Place

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Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

Cellar Door Theatre’s revival of Ridley’s contentious gothic tragicomedy gets points for endeavour, but doesn’t connect.

Cellar Door Theatre are taking us back to the heyday of what critic Alex Sierz once termed ‘in-yer-face’ theatre: a mode of bare-knuckle, confrontational performance that’s resolutely out of vogue on the Fringe circuit at the moment – to its detriment, some might say. Phillip Ridley’s Ghost from a Perfect Place kicks off with the return of Travis Flood to his old stomping ground in East London. The self-styled preeminent gentleman-gangster of Bethnal Green in the 60s, Flood is back after a lengthy sojournment in Hollywood (he claims), whereupon he finds the place now in the hands of the Disciples – a gang of young women led by the quasi-deified Rio Sparkes. Seemingly drawn to her power and charisma on a first meeting, Flood’s visit to the flat she shares with her grandmother Torchie catalyses a deluge of traumatic revelations that peel back the halcyon sheen of the aestheticised gangsterism of a bygone era to reveal its poisoned heart.

Even before Portishead and DJ Shadow make their (ever so slightly tacked-on) soundtrack appearances, Ghost from a Perfect Place succeeds in feeling firmly rooted in a 90s mode of punkish earnestness. Director Brittany Rex and co. shirk the post-post-modern flourishes of self-referential snark that typify the space right now (even in revivals), and there’s a refreshing quality to watching a young company full-throatedly commit to a weighty piece without the safety-net of irony beneath them. 

But in its execution, it’s fairly wide of the mark. The pacing is fatally languid at times, an effect compounded by a general samey-ness that pervades the piece’s lengthy and admittedly challenging monologues in particular. As the aged, Ozymandias-figure of Flood, Brian Arts manages to ooze a serpentine kind of sociopathy, his prowling physicality and rasping east-end drawl making him every inch the ghost of gangsters past: it’s a solid impression. But it also obscures most of the sly charm and charisma that made Flood who he was, which leaves him seeming more cartoon than tragic antihero. Karen Holly as Torchie never quite reaches escape velocity from a slightly anodyne brand of gentle kookiness, even if fragments of her rose-tinted memories achieve a measure of poignancy. The Disciples are a real hit-and-miss gang. Canitta Hart as Rio has tonnes of presence, but none of the magnetic authority of a nouvelle-prophetess, nor the febrile unpredictability of a young woman born and raised in trauma. Fatima Makhzoum and Maria Anthony (as Disciples Miss Sulphur and Miss Kerosene respectively) bring as much fortissimo energy as they can muster to their zany acolytes, but the problem is that they’re so busy being wacky that they risk functioning as merely screwball comic relief. There’s a lack of depth there that risks trivialising the thematic substructure that the production is trying to establish.

There are absolutely moments in this piece that feel deftly judged and elegantly intuited. Roger Godfrey’s set is clear and extremely well-constructed for a show of this scale; Rex’s staging is almost always watchable and fluid – a few bizarre dramaturgical and stylistic decisions aside. Its greatest asset is undoubtedly Ridley’s language, which, when given space to cut through, conjures a bruising (sur)reality all its own. But in the final estimation, Cellar Door just aren’t quite up to the task on a technical level. Considered as a whole, the piece feels lightweight and bloodless, the characters flat and archetypical – like Brechtian signifiers dropped into a play that demands we experience them as fractured, tortured souls in purgatorial agony. A combination of this same caricaturism and dialogue beats that regularly flirt with playing the gag rather than the moment, hollows out the horror, sadness and grief that seem key to the theatrical world we’re in here. Far from feeling provocative or dangerous, it’s surprisingly tame – with the stakes so underplayed at times that it’s hard to find any of the violence or heartbreak particularly meaningful.

This isn’t to say that Ridley’s brutal thematic preoccupations, his text’s mordant humour, or the frequent detours into trancelike oneirism are easy to manage. On the contrary, it’s notoriously difficult tonal territory to navigate; drawing out GFAPP’s uniquely ghastly vision of an almost spiritualised fetishisation of violent power and lingering trauma is eye-of-the-needle work. Cellar Door have bet on themselves with a challenging undertaking and, never one to discourage risk in fringe spaces, I feel they should be proud of themselves for doing so. But purely on the level of theatrical experience, GFAPP is difficult to connect with emotionally or intellectually, beyond fleeting glimpses of the ghost of a more exciting text haunting the stage.

REVIEW: Bloody, Bloody Kansas

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Rating: 2 out of 5.

“Heidi Van’s journey into the murky soul of the American West doesn’t quite raise the pulse.“

In the township of Osage, Kansas in 1873 – beneath the shadow of the Civil War and amidst the acceleration of the US’s Westward expansion – the Bender Family are getting down to their bloody business. Based on the notorious real-life family of serial killers dubbed the ‘Bloody Benders’ – who enticed numerous westward-bound travellers into their inn before murdering and robbing them – Heidi Van’s Bloody, Bloody Kansas follows Mary York (also played by Van) on her search for her missing husband William, who’s fallen into the family’s clutches. The real Mary York did in fact write a memoir about the Benders, and here she is our narrator, detailing the Benders’ gruesome rituals and recounting her desperate hunt for answers – which inevitably leads her directly into the path of that same murderous brood.

Bloody, Bloody Kansas joins a lengthy tradition of deep-fried gothic Americana, and the show appears to be positioning the Benders as inspirations for or antecedents to a subsequent cultural fixation on the murder and mayhem of the midwest and south. But BBK doesn’t approach the delirious, ecstatic strangeness of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for instance, nor the psychedelic shlock of Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses – both of which are borrowing from this same tradition. Instead, writer-director Heidi Van seems to be locating her story more in the dark-western vein of Sam Peckinpah or Cormac McCarthy – particularly the latter’s own treatise on the senseless violence of the Westward expansion, Blood Meridian. In setting the scene for us, Mary describes in sweeping detail the postbellum flood of Americans seeking land and livelihood further west – in which “some hunt and some are hunted”. The spectre of genocidal violence wrought upon Native Americans creeps around the peripheries: “Kansas,” Mary tells us, “was already bleeding.” But if the Bloody Benders are metonymic of the lawless, profane and omnipresent bloodlust of the colonial project, BBK doesn’t exactly mount a compelling case for it, either discursively or in its mood-stylings.

The plot itself is fairly thin and meandering in its structure, with a victim or two materialising to meet their ghastly fate. Mary’s flights of narration ram their way into the piece with a jagged repetitiousness; they’re lithely and solidly written, but are staged and delivered with scant variation, with a tendency to coax the piece into a stylised languor of expository material that doesn’t all the way support the development of any budding suspense. Micro-vignettes of the Bender family at dinner or about their ghoulish work pepper the show, but don’t often do a lot to cultivate an air of dread, nor to tighten the screws on us. 

The simple and fatal reality is that the Benders here just aren’t all that chilling. As the charlatan spiritualist Kate Bender, Katie Gilchrist brings a crisp and grounded presence to her devilish occultism, engendering an imperious sangfroid that’s watchable if not particularly intimidating. Vanessa A. Davis does a nice turn with the bloodthirsty murderer-in-chief John Jr.’s skittish eccentrics – but in practice he mostly reads as a gormless hyucking hillbilly: not exactly Hills-Have-Eyes levels of deranged evil. Bob Paisley doesn’t get a lot to work with as Pa Bender; he’s better as the ill-fated victim George Langcor, in which brief appearance he achieves a stolid gentility that paints shades of tragedy around the violence – it’s the most emotionally potent moment in the piece.

Van keeps the set wisely uncomplicated: weather-worn table in the centre, white sheet of fabric hoisted with hessian ropes through the middle of the space (which also serves as a screen for sporadically successful shadow work). It gives a productive sense of grimy sparsity that supports the action well. Costumes mostly do the same – Kate Bender’s darkly austere dress is eye-catching and articulate – though they’re occasionally baffling in the role-switching, with items thrown on top of others in an awkward mosaic. Hats well and truly off to John Story for some richly-produced music; it’s beautifully scored. It also veers off into some weird stylistic territory though, with detours through Morricone’s warbling harmonica or Elmer Bernstein’s sweeping rural idyllicism. These too have the unfortunate effect of rupturing the suspense somewhat. The lighting is a truly odd element in the piece: some scenes are so dimly or inconsistently lit that the already messy staging becomes nigh-on indecipherable.
Without any real tension or compelling narrative engine driving it forward, BBK’s attempts at horror are just a bit half-baked: like a friend telling you a ghost story with a torch under their face, saying “Ooooooooooo” every now and again. It’s not quite a glimpse into the abyss of the West’s dark soul; more a fleeting, creepy anecdote relayed in passing. The creative team have a core competency that holds the thing together, but it never catches alight.

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REVIEW: As You Like It

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Rating: 4 out of 5.

East London Shakespeare Festival’s zany, family-oriented rendering of Shakespeare’s comedy brings the pep and charm, even if it sacrifices some of the play’s potential nuance.

As far as accessible and outdoorsy Early Modern comedies go, As You Like It is a pretty intuitive candidate. A split setting between town and woods allows East London Shakespeare Festival to make clever use of not only their parkland surroundings, but also the facade of Clissold House in Stoke Newington – a building whose period brickwork and Victorian austerity all but meld into the show’s own set-pieces.

The plot is straight-down-the-line Shakespearean comedy: in Arden Town, the Old Duke has been supplanted by his scheming brother, leaving his daughter Rosalind in a precarious position. Her close friendship with the New Duke’s own daughter Celia has protected her thus far, but the welcome is wearing thin. After a romance blooms between Rosalind and Orlando – the disinherited and oppressed younger brother of New Duke-sycophant Oliver – she is banished from Arden, as is Orlando. With the devoted Celia in tow, Rosalind adopts a male alter-ego named Ganymede to affect her escape into the Forest of Arden. Love is un- and re-requited; wires are crossed; disguises are donned and unveiled; and in the end all is put to rights in a giddy flurry of matrimony. As You Like It doesn’t have the elegance of structure that Shakespeare’s other gender-bending comedy Twelfth Night retains, nor the ethereal lyricism of Midsummer – but there’s always plenty of rich poetry and clever wordplay to be found.

Any company embarking upon a summery, family-friendly Shakespeare-in-the-park comes in with a very specific mandate, and quite genuinely the best thing to be said about ELSF’s As You Like It is that the team absolutely understands the brief. The edit of the text (presumably by director Rosie Ward) is brisk and judicious; intuitive and inventive design by Lucy Fowler achieves the playful vibrancy it needs to; and the cast pile-on the audience interaction, winking anachronisms and goofy ad-libs (hats-off to the immortal exit-line “Look at that, duckie! It’s an AMEX!”). These latter few are the most consistently sharply-tuned tools in ELSF’s belt, along with the dramaturgical quips they mine from the text’s modernisation: Rosalind swanning into an exclusive club while paparazzi swarm and Gaga blares is a grand introduction to their own Arden Town. It’s clear the team are having a blast with this part of the process, and that ebullience becomes the infectious engine that drives the early sections in particular. It’s bright and breezy, and the cast are adept at drawing both the kids and adults into their playful world.

The cast have energy to burn, and bless them they leave it all out on the pitch. They’re fairly-well impossible not to find endearing. Fights by Meg Matthews are just as silly and deftly-conceived as they ought to be – particularly the early wrestling match between Orlando and ‘Charles the Wrestler’, which the team delightfully render as a WWE-adjacent spectacle. The music is hit-and-miss: when the cast have a chance to perform live with their own instruments it settles beautifully, but they feel a little marooned in the larger karaoke mash-up numbers.

The real hitch in the endeavour is that – with an unrelenting, comic-sans intensity as their guiding principle – ELSF risks smothering the play they’re there to perform. A lot of the time, Ward and her cast don’t seem to know when to play a moment straight – to let the text and the scenarios do some of the work for them. It’s as though they’re nervous that if they don’t swing for the fences with vaudevillian extremity when the opportunity arises, their audience might lose interest entirely. But the upshot of this is that the story and intention can get buried under whizz-bang gags and fortissimo scenery-chewing. The scene in which Rosalind (as Ganymede) and Orlando role-play his hypothetical wooing of Rosalind was a sometime-victim of this – losing a little of its sweet romanticism and the sly transgressiveness of its gender-bending; Emilia Harrild and Luke Martin absolutely have the chops to play this scene with clarity and earnestness, but they don’t quite get the chance. Melancholy Jaques’s oft-cited ‘Seven Ages of Man’ monologue definitely suffers from this malady. It’s an especially perilous ensnarement for an edit of this brevity, as later scenes and B-plots occasionally burst onto the stage and promptly vanish without appearing to make much sense at all.None of this is shooting for a revelatory take on As You Like It, but it’s not meant to! ELSF are out here to have a good time, and they’ve got the charm and energy to do it – even if they don’t always marry their pantomime vim with the depth of authentic feeling that Shakespeare’s poetry tends to offer. But if you’re looking for a picnic and a family night out, it delivers the sugary goods.

REVIEW: Open Source Intelligence and Counterinsurgency for the Jobbing Hater

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Rating: 3 out of 5.

A witty and high-energy blitz of wrath and disenfranchisement that loses focus in a scattershot flurry of conflicting ideas.

The first thing budding actress ‘Lili’ Lum Wai Man (Gawa Leung, also the playwright) tells us as she stalks through the audience towards the stage in Open Source Intelligence and Counterinsurgency for the Jobbing Hater is that she has three problems. 3) She can’t hug anyone without wanting to punch them in the throat. 2) She’s always angry. 1) You.
‘You’ in this case is Eve Xiao (Lorraine Yu), another East Asian aspiring actress in the UK, whose social media posturing and ersatz trauma-confessionals have become the focus of a pathological rage in Lili: a heady concoction of envy, distrust and projected self-loathing that has mutated into stalkeresque obsession. As her hatred spirals, it catalyses a swirling mix of confrontations with her familial trauma, fears, tumultuous relationships, and fragmentary sense of identity as an expat in a disorientingly performative landscape of forced otherness and cultural schism.

The company Brava Guava describes OSI as an ‘unpredictable three hander’ charting a ‘journey towards healing with anime music, puppetry, Shakespeare and Muay Thai’. Unpredictable is an understatement. OSI careens around the place – stylistically, formally, tonally – throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the wall to see what sticks. It leaves your head spinning: trying to grasp the piece and the character at its heart is like trying to hold smoke. Narrative threads crash into the show and then fizzle away; motifs flare-up and are jettisoned when a new instinct takes hold. This disjointed quality isn’t helped by the transitions between scenes, which largely happen in silent blackout with audibly clunky set changes. Lighting and sound (by Zidi Wu and Morik Liang respectively, with slick music by Filippo Galli) are hampered by the same dramaturgical inchoateness: they’re great when they’re great, but they can’t seem to decide what they’re supposed to be doing in the piece as a whole.

Occasionally this schizoid energy is a delightful rush, and it becomes an endearing facet of the show by virtue of its gutsy abandon. But it also means that Leung and director Tess Adèle Glinert can’t seem to follow their ideas through and let them breathe. That excessive quality might reflect Lili’s own overflowing psyche, but it equally renders a lot of the emotional impact oddly weightless. This is a particular shame because so many of the ideas in this piece are brilliant and have incredible potential. When it settles to something and really invests the time, it absolutely sings. For example, the two plinths onstage, one light one dark, constitute a snappy visual pun from Glinert and set designer Zidi Wu, particularly when Lili manipulates her mental projection of Eve, literally ‘putting her on a pedestal’ just to fantasise about tearing her down again. Indeed, the moments when Eve becomes a tragic cypher for Lili’s own fractured sense of self are genuinely funny and beautiful. Projections (also by Liang) are a highlight, injecting Edgar Wright levels of postmodern zip into the proceedings. The satire is sporadic but regularly astute and laugh-out-loud witty – Leung can absolutely spin a cracking one-liner.

Performances by Leung, Yu and Lavan Jeyarupalingam have buckets of energy. Jeyarupalingam is a charming presence as Lili’s partner (latterly ex), and the scenes between them are as fraught, funny and real as they need to be – especially as Jeyarupalingam begins to jump between refractions of the male figures in Lili’s life. They’re best when they relax into their roles and avoid hamming, at which point they all make clever and intuitive choices.

There’s so much skill and invention on display in OSI, and every one of these young theatre-makers has got the goods.The honesty of its reflections on family, culture, and self-destructive jealousy were frequently hilarious and moving. There’s a lot to say about it, and so many lovely choices to reflect on. Take a scalpel to this show and carve out some more dramaturgical coherency, chasing the juiciest ideas through to their fullest expression, and they’ve got a timely, potent and richly-observed character study on their hands.

REVIEW: Green

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Rating: 4 out of 5.

“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.