Declan Perring Archives - thespyinthestalls.com

Intra Muros

Park Theatre

Reviewed – 5th April 2019

★

“a thoroughly bland and disappointing ninety minutes”

The premise for Alexis Michalik’s play is a simple one: a director, an actor and a social worker go into a maximum security prison to hold a drama class for the inmates. Only two prisoners turn up. The class goes ahead anyway, and truths are revealed. It is described in the press release as ‘a captivating and darkly comic exploration of life, within the walls’, and, at a time when knife crime is on the rise in London, and just under 79,000 men are currently being held in British prisons (figure from Home Office website) this seemed like a brave and timely piece of theatre for the Park to be staging. Instead, what a thoroughly bland and disappointing ninety minutes it was.

In the programme notes, Michalik describes meeting some maximum security prisoners and how this meeting intrigued him sufficiently to lead him to write this play. One can only wish that this interest had led him to do some more thorough research. Among the more idiotic plot points of this drama was the fact that a child was conceived between a maximum security prisoner and a visitor during visiting time. As someone who has spent a great deal of time visiting prisons in the UK over the past three years, this reviewer can testify to the complete impossibility of this premise. Similarly, the idea of three lay people with little or no prison experience behind them being left alone with two violent offenders is absurd, as is the fact that the director would (a) be allowed and (b) have the utter front to ask an allegedly violent offender to re-enact the circumstances that led him to his imprisonment. There are some extraordinary companies and organisations creating drama with prisoners and ex-offenders in this country (Clean Break and Synergy Theatre Project to name two); it might have been an idea to engage with them.

The play is translated from the French, so it may well be that some of these issues are explained by cultural difference, but if you are clearly locating the action in the UK – Norwich and Durham are name-checked – this is basic stuff.

The drama opens with the director (played, with meta-theatrical symmetry, by the director, Che Walker) asking the audience directly, ‘What does theatre mean to you?’. The first audience member to answer replied ‘Storytelling’, and here, alas, this play fell short. It was impossible to understand why this story was being told, and also, particularly in the second half, it was not easy to follow such story as there was, as it was being told. Che’s director-character also made much of the power of emotion, and again, despite numerous on-stage breakdowns, the performances here, by and large, remained resolutely surface and unconnected throughout. Victor Gardener, as Angel, brought some welcome gravitas to the stage, but the characterisation in the main seemed skittish, rushed and unfocused. It takes more than a change of accent to outline a new character, and the lack of physical change in the performers from role to role was notable.

Accents that worked well were found in the sound and lighting design. Rio Kai’s double bass playing in the onstage underscore was a highlight, and David Howe provided some deft atmospheric changes with his lighting design, particularly against the back wall. Despite these efforts however, and ironically, given its meta-theatrical nature, Intra Muros remained theatrically unsatisfying, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

Reviewed for thespyinthestalls.com

Photography by Edward Johnson

Intra Muros

Park Theatre until 4th May

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

A Pupil | ★★★★ | November 2018

Dialektikon | ★★★½ | December 2018

Peter Pan | ★★★★ | December 2018

Rosenbaum’s Rescue | ★★★★★ | January 2019

The Dame | ★★★★ | January 2019

Gently Down The Stream | ★★★★★ | February 2019

My Dad’s Gap Year | ★★½ | February 2019

Cry Havoc | ★★ | March 2019

The Life I Lead | ★★★ | March 2019

We’re Staying Right Here | ★★★★ | March 2019

Click here to see more of our latest reviews on thespyinthestalls.com

★★★

“a black comedy but with a triple measure of black and just a sip of comedy”

Sam, The Good Person is not only a one-man show; the only actor is also the only writer. Declan Perring as the eponymous Sam, performs seventy five minutes of intense, sometimes comic soliloquy set during group therapy, as he recalls his life story so far. It is a story that some will recognise in a small way from their own life as Sam desperately craves the approval of others, but the extreme lengths he goes leads to, lead to a lifetime of lying and deception, culminating in extreme sadness.

Perring offers up an energetic and solid performance of Sam, punctuated with other characters and interludes which signify the panic attacks which the ultimately dislikeable Sam begins to experience. In the show, a handful of people are conspicuously missing as Perring tries to animate each of Sam’s Mother and Father, his childhood friend, his stalker from his youth and lastly his girlfriend of five years. Like a general seeking glory against the odds and so taking the battles he shouldn’t, Perring’s valiant effort on stage only masks his decision not to give full life to characters who so clearly warranted it. Director Stephanie Withers is complicit in this merry action with Perring jumping up and down from his seat and switching voices leaving it unclear whether this is Sam’s internal vision of these people or a real flashback fashioned by a mettlesome writer.

With the script itself, there is yet more complexity from strong, meaningful themes with real depth intertwined cutting against cliche lines and characters. This is a writer and a director who understand the realities of how anxiety turns good people into bad ones, and how that tension unfolds in the moment. Sam is grappling not just with the desire to be liked but his own condemnation of that desire, and he is moved faster and faster as he ricochets off those two points. It’s, therefore, more unfortunate that, at times, the script slips quietly into cliches such as ‘being noticed by the opposite sex’ or ‘the drugs made me numb, which I liked’. This tidy shorthand inevitably picks away at the deep feeling of authenticity or even autobiography.

Sam. The Good Person is a black comedy but with a triple measure of black and just a sip of comedy for a perfunctory chaser. The play culminates in real, total misery as Sam spirals downwards and the jokes peter out. Perring and Withers whisk the audience from spiky one-liners into a modern tragedy and with all the inevitability and fatedness of an ancient one. An interesting play with tapered peaks of authenticity and personal meaning set between shadowy valleys of missing actors, the somewhat dislikeable main character and a twist at the end which is less M. Night Shyamalan and more “then I woke up from a dream, or did I…’

Reviewed by William Nash

Photography by William Alder