★★

“Good design and convincing acting ultimately save this messy, drawn-out and static production”

‘Stop and Search’ is Gabriel Gbadamosi’s “play as a Londoner” and, like London, is a sprawling, confusing urban adventure brimming with big ideas. A strong opening scene sets up some intriguing characters with questionable histories, but it’s a downhill slog from there.

Built around three tediously long conversations, the play professes to explore personal distrust and the blurring of lines between friendly chat and interrogation. Tel (Shaun Mason) picks up hitchhiking Akim (Munashe Chirisa) on his way smuggling illegal furs across the Channel. Meanwhile good cop/bad cop team Tone (David Kirkbride) and Lee (Tyler Luke Cunningham) pass the time working on a surveillance job closely linked to Tel’s girlfriend Bev (Jessye Romeo) and his own illegal activity. The final scene sees Akim as a cab driver, picking up Bev who has started to question how much her life is worth living.

The constellation of characters and situation should lead to fireworks, but instead burns out to empty exposition. Gbadamosi’s script fails in creating action and plot within the temporal and spatial confines of the play. Those long, winding conversations, although littered with some pretty turns of phrase, are not interesting enough in their own right to hold our attention. In fact, by reaching towards style over substance, the dialogue becomes quite opaque at times, leaving audience members asking on their way out: “Did you get what that was about?”

Mehmet Ergen’s direction does not help matters. Two out of three scenes take place in a car and remain static and restricted because of it. There is no sense of place or atmosphere in the one outdoor scene. As with the script, the direction lacks action and hides behind the words. The scenic design is reminiscent of a grimy underground car park, and Daniel Balfour’s sound builds a suitable feeling of dread in the climax of the piece. The actors work hard to create complex and convincing characters and give the script a much-needed energy. Chirisa and Mason remain the most interesting and evenly matched partnership.

‘Stop and Search’ does to London what ‘True Detective’ did to L.A. There is a whole world hidden behind this script that wants exploring, but this is sadly not the play to do it. Good design and convincing acting ultimately save this messy, drawn-out and static production.

Reviewed by Joseph Prestwich

Photography by Idil Sukan

A Hero of our Time

Arcola Theatre

Reviewed – 21st November 2018

★★★★★

“a work of theatre that is contemporary in its face and historical in its head”

The country is Russia, the place, Hackney; the century, irrelevant. Lermontov gets off the train at Dalston Junction. Pushkin orders coffee at Costa, the ladies of the Tsar’s court try on press-on nails. And at the Arcola Theatre, the off-duty officer, Pechorin, kills time by messing with the romantic affairs of his friend, Grushnitsky.

Pechorin (Oliver Bennett) is not a bad man, per se, but he is driven by a love of poetry – what he calls poetry – and a resentment for those simple people who speak in a straightforward manner, who want basic things, like love and respect – like Grushnitsky (James Marlowe), a cadet who has fallen for the beautiful and charming Princess Mary (Scarlett Saunders). “Tell her her eyes are like velvet”, Pechorin suggests, and, “If you don’t ask her to dance the mazurka, someone else might first.”

HUNCHtheatre’s A Hero of Our Time, adapted from one part of the 19th century novel of the same name, by Mikhail Lermontov, looks at the distance between substance and style, function and form, content and poetry. Pechorin is a gifted orator – a skilled bullshitter, I mean – who assumes that his sense of language makes him more honourable than the people around him. And, indeed, he can talk his way into society circles, win the heart of the Princess with minimal effort. But when the pretense is dropped and Pechorin loses his words, he is as base and simple as anyone else: “If you fucking hit me, I’ll fucking hit you!” he swears, at his ex-lover.

Oliver Bennett is charming and personable, and, moreover, believable, not only in the dramatic sense, but in the rhetorical way also, because it’s easy to imagine that he is Pechorin, and it’s easy to think that he is right. Marlowe’s Grushnitsky is immediately sympathetic in his vulnerability. Saunders, as Princess Mary and also Pechorin’ ex-lover, Vera, is both beguiling and jaded.

Bennett (who also worked on the adaptation) and co-adaptor Vladimir Shcherban have created a work of theatre that is contemporary in its face and historical in its head. Their blending of linguistic styles, dramatic styles, their chic set and inventive staging remind us that in art, the stuff below has a tendency of coming up, often making a mess of the surfaces it breaks through. What a beautiful mess indeed is A Hero of Our Time. It evokes the poetry of a body, a sofa, a lemon, a lit match; the metre of a friendship; and the rhyme of violence.

Arcola Theatre

Reviewed – 14th January 2019

★★

“Good design and convincing acting ultimately save this messy, drawn-out and static production”

‘Stop and Search’ is Gabriel Gbadamosi’s “play as a Londoner” and, like London, is a sprawling, confusing urban adventure brimming with big ideas. A strong opening scene sets up some intriguing characters with questionable histories, but it’s a downhill slog from there.

‘Stop and Search’ does to London what ‘True Detective’ did to L.A. There is a whole world hidden behind this script that wants exploring, but this is sadly not the play to do it. Good design and convincing acting ultimately save this messy, drawn-out and static production.

Reviewed by Joseph Prestwich

Photography by Idil Sukan

Stop and Search

Arcola Theatre until 9th February

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

Arcola Theatre

Reviewed – 21st November 2018

★★★★★

“a work of theatre that is contemporary in its face and historical in its head”

Reviewed by Louis Train

Photography by Oleg Katchinsky

A Hero of our Time

Arcola Theatre until 15th December

Previously reviewed at this venue:

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