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The Game of Love and Chai – 3 Stars

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Chai

The Game of Love and Chai

Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch

Reviewed – 21st April 2018

★★★

“a fun and lively take on a traditional farce, contemporary, relevant and wittily reimagined”

 

“What’s so terrible about marriage?” Sita asks Rani. Raj is coming to the house, an intelligent and successful businessman, and a possible marriage prospect for Rani. But Rani isn’t convinced, so she enlists the help of her cousin Sita. They will exchange identities so that Rani can get to know the real Raj. What she hasn’t counted on is that Raj has had the same idea, and has swapped identities with his Uber driver. This is an original take on the 18th century french farce, ‘The Game of Love and Chance’ by Pierre Marivaux, which touches on love, marriage, mistaken identity and class. Adapted by Nigel Planer, he reinvents Marivaux’s play in an Asian household in modern day Britain, interspersed with Bollywood dances.

Goldy Notay as Kamala-Ji, Rani’s mother and Sita’s aunt, delivers a fantastic performance. She laughs her way around the stage, a glass of prosecco always in hand. She is always in on everyone’s plots and plays along with glee. Kiren Jogi as Sita also delivers a lovely performance, warm, genuine and immediately likeable, and the cast as a whole work well together.

Amidst the farce, the play also starts some really interesting conversations about the part class has to play within relationships, the culture of arranged marriages, and how to reconcile being independent and being in love. However, restricted by the original, these issues are not sufficiently explored and the final conclusions of the play predominantly reinforce them.

The asides worked well, as if we the audience are each characters’ confidante, however they are sometimes unclear due to the pace the production has a tendency to move at. Frustratingly, the actors perform more towards the audience than each other, which makes the connections between characters onstage appear weaker. This particularly affects the chemistry (or lack of) between Raj and Rani. On the whole, the piece is quite one note. It is overly frenetic at points, and I think some of the humour of the text is actually lost in this. Whilst the writing is funny, the slapstick visual comedy we usually see in farce is predominantly missing here and in a genre which is heavily reliant on this element, the piece suffers because of it.

Performed by a strong cast, this is a fun and lively take on a traditional farce, contemporary, relevant and wittily reimagined, and a lovely way to spend an evening.

 

Reviewed by Amelia Brown

Photography by Simon Annand

 

https://www.queens-theatre.co.uk

The Game of Love and Chai

Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch

 

Related
Previously at this venue
The Rope | ★★★★ | Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch | February 2018

 

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Rope – 4 Stars

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Rope

Rope

Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch

Reviewed – 17th February 2018

★★★★

“George Kemp is entrancing as the amoral, braggadocious Brendan”

 

Rope, written by Patrick Hamilton, debuted on the London stage in 1929 and this revival at The Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch transports the audience back to those hedonistic days with verve. It is based on the real-life case of Leopold and Loeb, two wealthy American students whose aspirations to prove their intellectual superiority executed what they hoped would be ‘the perfect murder’. Hamilton’s version transports the duo across the pond, becoming Brendan and Granillo, two Oxford undergraduate students driven by the same Nietzschean ideals to ‘live dangerously’. The arrogant swagger of privileged Oxford by-way-of public school boys portrayed here will be familiar to those who have seen Posh or it’s cinematic adaptation, The Riot Club, highlighting the enduring fascination of playwrights and audiences with this sect.

George Kemp is entrancing as the amoral, braggadocious Brendan, revelling in the feat he’s masterminded. His reluctant accomplice Granillo (played by James Sutton) is much less excited by it all, drinking to excess to calm the nerve he often comes close to losing. Rather than following the machinations leading to the murder, the audience instead meet the pair stuffing the body into a chest in Brandon’s Mayfair apartment as they discuss that night’s dinner party which will use the same chest as a buffet table. Guests include the murdered boy’s mother and aunt; two vacuous friends representing the average man and woman; and an artist friend, Rupert Cadell, played with gusto by Sam Jenkins-Shaw, who Brandon sees as his intellectual equal and therefore the most thrilling to evade.

The divide between what the audience and the guests know keeps tensions high and is enhanced by the clever lighting, designed by Mark Dymock, that’s opening red glow conveys the mood and enables just enough light to observe the murderous pair.

At times, some of the dialogue feels clumsy and lacking sophistication for contemporary audiences – particularly when Brandon tells the audience via Granillo the ‘facts’ of the murder they’ve just committed. There are also jokes which belabour the gag so as to feel like filler. However, this is all delivered with style by the cast and is a fault of Hamilton’s script, rather than this production. There was, however, an unfortunate technical issue which spoilt the final moments of the piece, resulting in ripples of laughter from the audience which can only be assumed not to have been the desired effect. Despite this damp squib, the skillful exploitation of dramatic irony and resulting macabre humour, makes for a thoroughly gripping night of theatre.

 

Reviewed by Amber Woodward

Photography by Mark Sepple

 


Rope

Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch until 3rd March

 

 

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