Dominic Gettins Archives - Page 12 of 18

★★

“The first act does well despite its outlandish plotting, thanks to some stalwart character comedy”

While lying dead in an open coffin in his own flat, several unlikely things happen to John Jones, the central character of this darkish three-act play. An underworld criminal sends in a glamorous blonde to plant a package into a biscuit barrel (spoiler alert: for no apparent reason) and a maid mistakenly comes to the flat for an interview. John then wakes up from what turns out to be a coma to catch his girlfriend with the man she has been seeing on the side and now wishes to move in. Hilarity ensues, driven by his girlfriend’s perceived financial interest in the flat and the glamorous blonde unfeasibly returning as the love interest for his new, wild, post-death life.

Author Max Nowaz has had some success with elaborately plotted fantasy novels but veers here into an unlikely genre mish-mash. Farce, being one of those genres, relies on the plot working like a machine to make up for two dimensional characters. Refreshing though it is to see it tried, this machine gradually starts to rattle. The first act does well despite its outlandish plotting, thanks to some stalwart character comedy from Alex Pitcher as John and Nicola Mae Begley as Mrs Short the maid, but thereafter the pace slows, the structure wobbles and the plot’s loose ends flap around in the wind. Scenes end randomly and on the press night the audience, unable to figure out when the interval was, appeared at one point to be staging a walk out.

However, with a one act version performed in 2013, ‘Cheating Death’ is arguably still a work in progress; viewed as such, there is much to keep alive. The interplay between the stock characters creates good situation comedy and running jokes. While there’s nothing new about a maid that keeps making tea, a sexually inhibited British bachelor and a Russian blonde that drinks vodka shots, their foibles are easy to enjoy. The cast, gleaned from the final year of The Poor School (as is the play’s Director, Sophie Wilson), lack confidence in places, often killing the pace by trying to milk their laughs. Despite the longueurs, there is a fun and free-wheeling narrative to build on, and nothing much wrong with the production that rehearsals couldn’t put right.

Reviewed by Dominic Gettins

Photography by Sophie Wilson

The South Afreakins

The Space

Reviewed – 20th February 2019

★★★★★

“She is confident, technically brilliant, writes superbly and plays her roles entirely convincingly”

On the day of his retirement, Gordon is keen to slip into a life of white privilege, golf-playing and rugby-watching, expecting simply to wait and be waited on. To his wife, Helene, it’s now time to escape South Africa, leaving behind the terrors of pilfering maids, the violence of the disenfranchised black population – and her own imagination. It’s a short-lived debate. Despite the loss of lands, memories, dear old friends and Gordon’s flat-out ‘no’, they find themselves on a plane to New Zealand. They are an ordinary and hardly sympathetic pair, yet through their marital back and forth we get to know and like them better. Helene; bright and optimistic, with a lightly comic desperation, Gordon; leaden, stooped, but loyal and caring. Once settled in the promised land Helene thrives, Gordon declines, lost on the wrong side of his own life and yearning for home.

The script is an object lesson in writing about what you know. Robyn Paterson, an experienced TV and film performer and director south of the equator, has built up this play by listening with ruthless clarity to her own parents, and renders them both with deftness. Not only does she constantly toggle between the two throughout ninety minutes of rapid firing dialogue, she somehow word-paints the significant others in their lives in various one-sided conversations on phones and Skype. We get a sense, too, of the couple’s back story, most poignantly through Helene’s paintings of a tree outside, planted in memory of their dead son. The action itself takes us into planes, buses and a hospital room as well as their two homes, with scene changes effected endearingly by Helene herself, tidying away unwanted props in character while on the phone.

Dressed in a simple, black tee-shirt and jeans, Robyn Paterson seems to conjure up this whole world from within herself. It uses her childhood memories, her talent for mimicry and her family’s story, as well as playing all the parts; she even uses a practical lamp to operate her own light changes; The South Afreakins is a one-woman show of exceptional one-woman-ness. She is confident, technically brilliant, writes superbly and plays her roles entirely convincingly. How all this can apply to subjects other than her own family and to subjects other than white South African displacement in the 1990s, who knows? But in and of itself, this is a rare accomplishment that qualifies as a ‘must-see’.

Cockpit Theatre

Reviewed – 26th February 2019

★★

“The first act does well despite its outlandish plotting, thanks to some stalwart character comedy”

Reviewed by Dominic Gettins

Photography by Sophie Wilson

Cheating Death

Cockpit Theatre until 10th March

Previously reviewed at this venue:

The Space

Reviewed – 20th February 2019

★★★★★

“She is confident, technically brilliant, writes superbly and plays her roles entirely convincingly”

Reviewed by Dominic Gettins

Photography by Tom Chaplin

The South Afreakins

The Space until 23rd February

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue: