“Over the course of the play, no antagonist is revealed, and little conflict truly arises, resulting in a flat conclusion”
Performance itself lies at the heart of The Prince, Abigail Thorn’s playwriting debut at Southwark Playhouse’s Large Theatre. Characters find themselves stuck inside a multiverse of Shakespearean dramas (Though the action is mostly confined to Henry IV Part I) and at odds with the rigidity of their roles. Sam, played by Joni Ayton-Kent, who is cast as a number of nameless bit characters, is desperately searching for a way out. Mary Malone plays Jen, who finds herself in a similar situation and decides to tag along with Sam. Jen, however, finds tensions within the ways in which the primary characters perform their gender, and begins to poke holes in their constructed identities. In particular, Jen reads Thorn’s Hotspur as a trans woman and Corey Montague Sholay’s Prince Hal as a gay man. Over the course of the play, both characters waffle between conformity to their roles and self-actualization, a broader metaphor for the struggles endured and decisions faced when butting up against a rigid gender binary, especially the construct of masculinity. Though The Prince suffers from a lack of narrative coherence, the metaphor is powerful and at times quite personally affecting.
Thorn and Malone, both in principal roles, turn in strong performances. Malone plays Jen’s fish-out-of-water bewilderment with earnest charm and comedic timing. The funniest moments of the play come from the ways in which other characters play off of hers. Thorn, as Hotspur, carries the show. She peels back her character’s internal tension in careful layers and remains nimble and forceful in her handling of both her own verse and Shakespeare’s. The scenes in which she actively decides to continue in the role of the masculine hero at the expense of her own identity carry tremendous weight. It is unfortunate then, that the structural foundation of the play is unable to support these performances.
The Prince seems to eschew both coherent world-building and narrative signposting, both of which are essential when leading an audience through a multiverse. The moments when Jen is able to break the Shakespearean characters out of their performances are nearly indistinguishable for the moments when they remain stuck. In essence, these breaks happen at random, giving Jen little to learn about the mechanics of the world into which she has been dropped. Sam’s desire to escape should be easily aided by a magical map of sorts, represented by a somewhat unconvincing plastic tetrahedron, but the object only appears all-powerful in Jen’s hands, though no context is given to allow the audience to understand this discrepancy. These two characters are also denied specific or rich inner lives, even an inkling of who they might be outside of their current situation. The multiverse device primarily exists in absentia, as most of Sam and Jen’s haphazard narrative hopping occurs within Henry IV Part I. The play’s only detour into Hamlet arrives without much context and serves only as justification to shoehorn in the “To be, or not to be?” soliloquy, though Thorn delivers it well. Over the course of the play, no antagonist is revealed, and little conflict truly arises, resulting in a flat conclusion.
Martha Godfrey’s lighting design feels similarly uneven. The tubes of LED light that hang at odd angles above the playing space are visually compelling and seem to indicate different corners of the Shakespearean multiverse. But their function remains out of sync with the play throughout, illuminating, changing colours, falling and rising without impetus or textual justification. Rebecca Cartwright’s historical costumes, on the other hand, are a strong point of the play’s design—the ways in which they mutate alongside Jen’s poking and prodding is masterful.
Though it contains joyous and raucous moments, as well as symbolic significance, Thorn’s debut remains unnecessarily messy throughout, wanting for narrative drive and formal consistency.
“To see the moments of queer joy that are portrayed here is truly a pleasure”
The P Word, written by Waleed Akhtar, finds itself caught in the space between a two hander and a series of monologues. The play remains grounded, however, by its layered character and their wit.
Bilal, played by Akhtar, details to the audience his experiences as a British Pakistani man in the gay dating scene. He lets his prejudices, fatphobia and islamophobia in particular, be known early on, as well as sources of their internalization. Zafar, played by Esh Alladi, arrives onstage mid-trauma: engaged in an unsuccessful bid to seek asylum in the UK, his partner murdered, his life endangered by a homophobic father were he to be deported to Pakistan. The play only kicks into gear, however, when the two characters bump into one another in the middle of Soho during Pride.
The set, designed by Max Johns, is minimal and elegant. A raised, circular, rotating platform, carries the characters temporally through the play. Each half of the platform tilts in the opposite direction, and LED light illuminates the outline of each semicircle, enclosing Bilal and Zafar in their disparate experiences for the first half of the play. Small compartments built into the set facilitate quick changes, allowing both actors to remain onstage for the duration of the play. These transitions, however, can feel rushed, more marked than they are performed.
Before Bilal and Zafar meet, they communicate exclusively in parallel monologue. Most of the unseen characters in Zafar monologues—a stranger, his mother, a healthcare worker—make their presence known through voiceover. Akhtar steps outside of Bilal’s character with more regularity, voicing his hookups and co-workers, lending his monologues the quality of a one-person show. This particular directorial choice by Anthony Simpson-Pike could be intended to further distinguish Bilal and Zafar’s narratives, but it results in a garbled theatrical language. The formal discrepancy, along with the duration of the parallel monologue sections, lends a dragging and uneven quality to the first half of the play, despite strong performances from Akhtar and Alladi.
Even after Bilal and Zafar have had their chance encounter and begin to share scenes, these parallel monologues persist. The two characters frequently break from engaging moments of dialogue to speak directly to the audience, halting the pace of the second half. The P Word finds its emotional core within the extended and mostly uninterrupted scenes between Bilal and Zafar. Bilal confronts his internalized prejudices, while Zafar begins to heal from the murder of his partner, Haroon. These scenes are both tender and emotionally fraught, blissfully banal and high stakes. To see the moments of queer joy that are portrayed here is truly a pleasure.
In The P Word’s final moments, following a somewhat sensationalized and romanticized conclusion, the world of the play briefly cracks. Though the break seems to be inspired by works such as Jackie Sibblies Dury’s ‘Fairview’, it reads more like an admission than it does a true confrontation, inadvertently letting the audience and performance off the hook.
