“Excepting the performances, everything feels a bit “debut”, despite the creative team’s impressive programme credits”
Kyle has spent his whole life desperate to be in the army. Idolising his father who was a soldier, he’s sacrificed the possibility of love, both romantic and familial, to ensure his military future. When he meets Chuck while serving in Afghanistan, he starts to wonder if he can have both. But after stepping on an IED, his hopes are upended.
Paper Cut by Andrew Rosendorf poses some important questions about masculinity, family loyalty, and love. The idea that gay men should have had to hide their sexual orientation in order to serve is rightly highlighted as bizarre and destructive, and the idea, too, that romantic love requires sex is called in to question.
Kyle’s relationship with his twin brother Jack is a brilliant example of unconditional love, of caring for someone even after they’ve betrayed you for their own ends. Joe Bollard as Jack is warm and awkward, laughs and tears coming as easily as each other, and he’s a brilliant counterpart to his overly intense brother.
Prince Kundai, who plays love interest Chuck, is charismatic and lovable. Entirely comfortable in his own skin, and endearingly sincere, it’s easy to see how he and Kyle might slip from friends to lovers.
Tobie Donovan, playing Harry, another love interest, is sweet and ridiculous. He’s got great comic timing and even gets a few laughs where I’m not sure there was supposed to be one.
While the plot itself is gritty and melancholy, the script feels a little too sentimental, relying on clichés and long…meaningful…pauses. Callum Mardy (Kyle) seems to get the bulk of these staring-off-in-the-distance speeches about the meaning of serving your country and so forth, and it overrides the genuine tragedy of his story, with him coming off a little ridiculous.
The script’s final lines, for example, completely diminish the fervent conversation that preceded them, as Kyle and Chuck look out at the sunset: “If you could go back and change anything, would you?”/ “So much.” The end. It’s just a bit lazy. And it’s a shame because in Mardy’s moments of levity, irony and even anger, he shows his capabilities, but he’s let down by the script’s sap.
Sorcha Corcoran’s design, a simple wooden backwall with a row of inbuilt storage chests, works fine, serving its practical purpose of hiding props and keeping the stage clean. That is, until the penultimate scene when before, in the cover of dark, the stage is scattered with gold confetti. This all comes to make sense when the final scene takes place on the beach, but less so when we’re in Jack’s apartment. Why not just wait a minute, and scatter the confetti directly before the beach scene? Or, given how minimalist the rest of the set is, why do it at all?
Lucia Sanchez Roldan’s lighting design is inoffensive: Strip lights hang from the ceiling, changing colours throughout. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with the story though, and seems a bit “designy” for the sake of it.
Excepting the performances, everything feels a bit “debut”, despite the creative team’s impressive programme credits. That said, there’s plenty to work with, and nothing a bit of red ink couldn’t fix.
“This tiny production has no business being as good as it is and, the cherry on the cake, it is perfectly succinct”
The King’s Head brings to life Edgar Allan Poe’s short horror story in vivid brutal detail.
With no props, no stage design, the story is left entirely in the bloody hands of our anti-hero, played by Keaton Guimarães-Tolley, and multi-instrumentalist Catherine Warnock.
The story is a simple one, as with all great horror stories: a man, once tender of heart, grows restless and morose over the years, and in a drunken stupor murders his beloved cat. Henceforth he is plagued by guilt and eventually driven to madness.
Where some might have felt the need to add fuss and embellishment, this production understands that the story is made all the more affective by its plain telling. The narrator’s cravat, removed from his neck and tied into a small red noose, is plenty enough to make the audience gasp and shudder as an invisible cat hangs slack in its knot.
That being said, there is nothing plain about Catherine Warnock’s instrumentation. Moving easily and swiftly between clarinet, flute and violin to suit the scene, it’s really her presence that allows the King’s Head such a spartan design. Not only does she contribute the entire fraught soundtrack, but she also acts as wordless long-suffering wife, and silent jury to the narrator’s crimes. An ingenious addition to an otherwise one-man play, giving depth and true terror to this small tale.
Keaton Guimarães-Tolley shows fantastic range, beginning as a sweet, gangly goof, and morphing into a monstrous wreck. A perfect casting.
This tiny production has no business being as good as it is and, the cherry on the cake, it is perfectly succinct. There’s no need for an interval to break the building tension, because it’s all over in 45 minutes, and the audience is left reeling out of the auditorium, wanting only to go home and hold their cats lovingly and whisper, “I would never.”
