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I saw this play with a friend on the second night. Firstly, congratulations on the lighting – which, apart from one small glitch which left a player in darkness, was excellent. Congratulations to Nick Instey for this. The scenery was, as is usual at the Tower, simple but very effective, so well done, Angelika Michitsch. Feiyang Yang is also to be congratulated on both the sound design and the direction of the play.
Not the lightest of entertainment, this play was very well acted. Apart from Patrick Lally’s Charlie/Adam and Simone La Martina’s Sophia, the remaining cast members took on several parts each – which must be a difficult trick to pull off in such a small space. There were no fluffs that I could see or hear. – players switching characters and accents both easily and well.
This is very much a “play for today” – perhaps particularly in inner city London (or any other big city for that matter), where there are so many single people working in the corporate arena in which they are pressurised, while working very hard (often to the exclusion of meaningful relationships or relaxation), Charlie – who attempts to become Adam – is, we suspect, lonely and over-stretched. He has turned to Cocaine and alcohol, then his Mother dies. This may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, One senses the loneliness coming through, the stress, the lack of real relationships with colleagues, the overwork – and the chemical stimulants. Losing a parent is a scary thing at any time in life. Charlie feels left behind, which is probably why he carries his mother’s ashes around with him. The fact that it is Christmas no doubt adds to such feelings (there are many suicides around the Christmas/New Year period when people feel they should be happy and enjoying themselves but are not). He disintegrates before our eyes – the use of repetition in the monologues of Charlie add to the feeling that this is not going to end well. He feels that he is watching himself – and the feeling of being “other” at a party only increases this He has the idea that all of the world in which he is living and working is fake.
Attempting to escape, he goes back to Southend on Sea – where he spent time in his childhood – and visits Mike. We know that Mike has some connection to Charlie’s mother – we don’t know exactly what that connection is. Mike, it transpires, is something of a conman and tells Charlie how he (Charlie) can disappear and set up a new life for himself. My immediate thought, based on things I have seen in others and experienced, is that Charlie may be able to disappear but he will always be there with “Adam”, his new persona. We can change our appearance, our job, our circle of friends, where we live, dump our family even but “we” are always with us. If one is unhappy with the status quo, this is the thing that is hardest to change.
The gradually developing twist I will not disclose – no spoiler! I was interested to note that Patrick Lally himself works in the field of addiction and mental health. His performance was often gut-wrenchingly moving, even if there were times when I would have liked to tell him to pull himself together (not politically correct and rather old-school) and perhaps change his job. To my mind, one of the problems of modern society of this type is that people want “a career” but, when all is said and done, a career is just a job and there are other things in life that are important but frequently neglected until it is too late. For instance, did Charlie feel guilty about his mother’s death? So many people do feel guilty on the death of a parent – did we fail him/her, for instance?
An underlying theme in the play was the lack of God in life. Religious belief gives us a sense of something other, something greater than we are ourselves. In the general drifting of lives in the corporate milieu in which Charlie finds himself, this sense of “awe” is something that is missing – just as the Jesuits found it missing at the Reformation, building wonderful churches to encourage this sense of awe among the faithful. When Charlie goes to the graveyard to look for a name for his new persona, he comes across a priest, one who is evidently struggling with his life. The priest himself doubts God’s existence and seems, like Charlie, to have turned to externals to help him through the day (in this case, alcohol). The priest is, no doubt, also lonely, while having to deal all the time with the problems of others. Despite the subject matter seeming to be desolate, this is a play that is not without humour. In fact, the friend who was with me said that she was surprised how much less depressing the play was than she had expected.
I found this play to be well-written and interesting, if not exactly typical Christmas fare. I will certainly look out for future Finn Kennedy plays.
Just as an aside – the Christmas tree and the mulled wine were a nice touch on what was a freezing cold night! Compliments to both the front- and back-of-house staff.
Photography by Jason Harris
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