★★★★

“A swift and savage piece of satire”

Every so often we come across a piece of theatre that forces the audience to concentrate. Never Swim Alone, directed in this version by Alexander Hick, does just this.

A swift and savage piece of satire by award-winning Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor, Never Swim Alone pits Bill (played by Azan Ahmed) and Frank (played by Jack Dillon) against one another in a series of thirteen rounds to determine who is Top-Dog. Once childhood friends it is initially unclear why these two are at odds. Outside of a slight height difference they seem the same person, dressed in an almost identical white shirt, black suit, black socks and tie combination and carrying leather briefcases. However, as the play gathers momentum and neither man can keep the upper hand for long their competitiveness becomes steadily more visceral and disturbing.

Bill and Frank’s relationship is an absolute triumph for Ahmed and Dillon who act with their emotions tightly in check, but constantly at risk of boiling over as their conflict intensifies. The way they often speak in unison, sometimes echoing each other and at other times sharing different stories, without dropping the pace is impressive to say the least. However, the use of repetition in combination with debate style dialogue often proves difficult to follow and the audience is left guessing why a point was awarded to one man rather than the other.

Each round is refereed by a mysterious girl (played by Tabatha Gregg-Allured) who blows a whistle ahead of each round and records the points of on a whiteboard which stands in prime position for the whole audience to bear witness. It is slowly revealed that the referee is not the impartial figure she seems at first. While she does prevent things from going too far at times, she knows how to prod and manipulate their emotions. Gregg-Allured’s performance with this is subtle, sometimes depending too heavily on her whistle to portray distaste in what the men are saying. Granted, she is little more than a prop in Frank and Bill’s play, but a little more confidence would have helped her cut a more striking performance. Where she lets her emotions out, however, they work perfectly in aiding the audience in dissecting the tangle of toxic masculinity.

For the first half of the play the referee seems in control of the two men’s competition, trapped as they are in physical manifestation of their past trauma. Bill and Frank are not granted full reign of the stage but are forced to execute their ritualistic “boxing-match” in a taped-off section of the performance space. Only once the fight becomes physical is the tape removed by the referee and the skeletons of their past become visible.

What we are left with are two broken men, their longing for lost boyhood summers eclipsed by a struggle to prove themselves against their peers.

Reviewed by Alexandra Wilbraham

Photography by Harry Elletson

Rats

Etcetera Theatre

Reviewed – 21st November 2018

★

“passion and individualism are the breath of life, and characters devoid of both, whether on stage or off, simply fail to engage”

Rats is set in a dystopian future, in which the majority of the world’s population has its ego suppressed at birth. As a disembodied voice tells us in the play’s opening moments, this frees the world from the ‘religion of humanism’ which has allowed passion and individualism to reign and create havoc for too long; thus making way for a more efficient and rational society. The play claims to explore what it means to be an individual in a world governed by technology, as well as whether or not individuality is, in fact, a desirable quality. At a time when the destructive power of Trump’s rampant narcissism is continually on display, and we spend more and more time at some form of technological interface, these questions could not be more pertinent. Unfortunately however, Gaël van den Bossche’s play fails truly to wrestle with these ideas, giving them only the most superficial treatment, and we are thus left unchallenged, and none the wiser.

Part of the problem here is the wealth of the dystopian back catalogue. From 1984 and Brave New World, right up until Charlie Brooker’s superb Black Mirror series, we are a culturally literate society when it comes to bleak future forecasting. Huxley was on to the idea of an embryonically-engineered drone underclass in 1931, and Rats failed to explore new territory in this regard. In addition, one of the reasons why Black Mirror was as successful as it was, was the brilliance with which the series made use of its medium, and this was another area in which Rats failed to deliver. Dystopian drama on the stage is more of an unknown, and Rats would have benefited from a big dose of theatrical invention, particularly in terms of movement. The script cried out for a more surreal approach, and a heightened physical language would have been helpful to the actors.

Despite some lovely work from Charlotte Bloomsbury as Katy, the characters failed to lift off the page, which made it difficult to invest in their plight. This was, of course, made doubly difficult by the monotonous nature of the ego-less mind, but it was telling that George (David Clayton) frequently sounded as artificial as his robotic fellows. This was in no small part owing to the fact that the moments of human interaction in the play all derived from the immediate situation. Much of the terror/wonder of the human mind lies in its imagination – our transcendent ability as a species – and there was very little of that in evidence, other than the self-confessedly terrible poetry Lynn (Hayley Osborne) eventually shares. The audience would have benefited from seeing the fully human characters temporarily freed from the shackles of their circumstances; it therefore seemed an extraordinary choice not to play out George and Lynn’s drunken evening, in which we could finally have seen the two of them in all their messy ego-driven glory.

Perhaps this play did ultimately answer one of the questions it purported to ask: passion and individualism are the breath of life, and characters devoid of both, whether on stage or off, simply fail to engage.

Etcetera Theatre

Reviewed – 28th November 2018

★★★★

“A swift and savage piece of satire”

Every so often we come across a piece of theatre that forces the audience to concentrate. Never Swim Alone, directed in this version by Alexander Hick, does just this.

What we are left with are two broken men, their longing for lost boyhood summers eclipsed by a struggle to prove themselves against their peers.

Reviewed by Alexandra Wilbraham

Photography by Harry Elletson

Never Swim Alone

Etcetera Theatre until 1st December

Previous ten shows reviewed at this venue:

Etcetera Theatre

Reviewed – 21st November 2018

★

“passion and individualism are the breath of life, and characters devoid of both, whether on stage or off, simply fail to engage”

Perhaps this play did ultimately answer one of the questions it purported to ask: passion and individualism are the breath of life, and characters devoid of both, whether on stage or off, simply fail to engage.

Reviewed by Rebecca Crankshaw

Rats

Etcetera Theatre until 25th November

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

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