By Deborah Frances-White
Directed by Emma Butler
Designed by Frankie Bradshaw
World Premiere
Minerva Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre
Thursday 7th September 2023 14.15
CAST:
Alexandra Roach – Jacq
Amit Shah- Kas
Greg Wise- Tobin
Susan Wokoma- Adaego
The set is the Masada restaurant, a boutique restaurant run by Kas (Amit Shah) and Jacq (Alex Roach). It starts off with Jacq finishing the salad and dancing, and the spoon lick was an instant laugh BUT she should have double-dipped it, or someone else should have licked it unknowingly later. Missed opportunity.
They’ve been running for two years with the big idea that everything is prepared at each table. There is no kitchen. The set shows four tables. Each has a large flame device which will be important (and brilliantly co-ordinated mechanically).
They are a couple, but unmarried. The restaurant is about to go bankrupt, and they have closed it for the night to invite two married friends, Tobin (Greg Wise) and Adaego (Susan Wokoma), for a meal. Tobin had invested in the restaurant, and he is about to be told that he’s lost the money. They need to break it to him. They start drinking, get royally pissed, and it results in a game called Never Have I Ever.
I didn’t know it having led a sheltered life, but Googling finds ‘teenvogue’ which tells me it’s a ‘slumber party classic.’ OK. Someone says something they have not done and others have to own up if they have. On ‘teen vogue’ it’s things like ‘Never have I ever read a book in a day.’ This is an alcohol version, so maybe they have to drink when they own up. Dunno. Whatever, the questions here are mainly sexual, so it leads to revelations of infidelity that shake their entire relationship. No plot spoilers … that much is in the advertising flier.
Tobin is an ethical hedge fund manager and is loaded with money. We discover that three of them, Jacq, Kas and Adaego, were friends and contemporaries at uni and sharing a house, and Tobin was finishing his Ph.D as they started, so he is older, at least six years. It is uni, a word I still shudder at through some inbuilt snobbery. We are not Australian and so need not be addicted to abbreviation. I’m delighted that my Word spellcheck continues to underline ‘uni’ in red. When my son started at Southampton in 2000, Southampton was a university. Solent, the old poly in the town centre was a uni. I was already a tad out of date I know. Then I heard two Cambridge Ph.Ds talking about their days at ‘uni’ and I realised language had changed unstoppably. I don’t think of Cambridge as a uni. Anglia is a uni. These people were at their uni ten years ago, so circa 2013. That places them between my kids’ generation and my grandkids’ generation. I know little of them then and I really don’t like their music much.
Adaego is a podcaster and influencer, talking on women of colour. She’s also from a wealthy background. Tobin is a beleaguered straight white male, three words that appear many times. Given Jacq’s Welsh accent here, he’s also the only white English person. The play has long discussions on the meaning of ‘woke,’ cultural appropriation, gender politics, financial ethics. We must assume that Susan Wokoma playing Adaego had jokes about her name in rehearsals, Woke Wokoma, but that’s something my generation would have done. I fear this generation as portrayed had sensitivity training and wouldn’t. Tobin gets worked up on being the most left wing of them all, even if he is a hedge fund manager. Later there’s a gayer-than-thou conversation to add. Several of these arrows hit the right target, the right bells are rung, but to me it was heavy-handed and ponderous in the script and that was Act one. It gets more heavy handed.
The best bit of the play by a mile is in act one. The lights flash on and off, columns of flame erupt from every table, Toxic is playing and the cast are caught dancing on tables or whatever with perfect timing and lighting. Toxic is ten years earlier (2004 hit), if we assume that ‘now’ is 2023 and they were at ‘uni’ ten years earlier, but then it’s stayed popular and when I was 21, we really loved songs from when we were fourteen / fifteen. At this point I thought the direction and choreography of action and lighting were superb.
The timing is upside down. Act one was forty-five minutes, but then Act two was seventy-five minutes. To me, it’s a basic rule that unless there are exceptional circumstances (as in some three act plays where the set change has to be before act two and there is a single interval), Act two is shorter or the same length as Act one. The contrast is accentuated because Act one has a considerable amount of high speed dramatic action, and Act two has a considerable amount of long monologues. I’d set the interval later, though they choose to do a freeze / continue break at a particularly dramatic line.
Then the stage direction and positioning is puzzling. Chichester is a three quarters in the round flat floor theatre. They have placed a low rectangular thrust stage on top, but in Act two, crucial scenes are dialogues in the cellar. So where do they put it? In the entrance way. The action was just in front of row A for one speaker, around row B for the other.)
OK, we were in Row B right by the action and side on so could see both actors. But one had their back to that half of the theatre sitting at the sides of the thrust stage. That was true in all the dialogues there. We’ve sat at the sides and it’s sometimes problematic seeing action at the front of the stage area, let alone beyond the front into the entrance. We’ve also sat at the top of the stage facing section, the rake is steep, and you can’t see down into the entrance area. Look at the picture. More often they were with one with their back to the audience. In sections, one was sitting on the boxes bottom right, which is well into the entrance passage.
I couldn’t believe that any director had made that choice. What happened to watching a rehearsal and moving round the theatre checking the action, lights and sound clarity from different areas? We have seen the director do that on early performances at the Wanamaker Playhouse, let alone a rehearsal. Mind-bogglingly direction and set design. The issue is they need a wine cellar, and have steps down at the rear stage left. They need the street outside which is at the rear of the set. Right. It’s simple. There is a joke noise of falling down the cellar steps. Sorry, you have to lose that. The wine cellar is not literally a cellar in most restaurants, is it? There was room at the rear stage left to have a wine cellar as a climate controlled room with glass doors (like real restaurants). They have conversations in the street outside, stage right. They could have the wine cellar (wine store?) conversations in a room stage left.
Otherwise the design looks great. The thrust stage has two rows of bottles right around underneath, which presumably emptied the Minerva restaurant’s back store. I mentioned that wine stores are not assorted in restaurants. Reds are together, and there are blocks of the same bottle not a variegated assortment of coloured tops and red, white and rosé, but OK, it looks better the way they did it.
I thought it played to its generation – some of that age group stood and applauded ecstatically at the end. There are some great moments. No plot spoilers, but Adaego’s last entrance is one.
I was waiting for Kas’s rant, because the other three had all had one, and I’d figured he was next.
Then after all the angst and shouting about infidelities and sexual orientation, the real moment of shocked horror for the group is when Kas says ‘Never have I ever … voted Remain.’ He simply didn’t vote, but it was very funny that his Brexit choice was far greater than anything else in their lives. It was also clever. By this point we’re getting Adaego and Kas arguing about being black versus being brown.
Kas not voting Remain when he’s the son of an immigrant is the shock to them. Kas is Kassim, an Arabic given name. It exists in Pakistan too, but could be from any Muslim country. Actually it figures. Look at the Conservative Brexiteer governments … Sunak, Braverman, Patel. I had a conversation with a local politician of Indian origin once. Yes, they have cultural ties with Britain and the English language. They don’t have cultural ties with Continental Europe, and the influx of European immigration in the 2000s, coupled with EU rules certainly restricted immigration from South Asia and anywhere else outside the EU. The writer has pinned a point that few of us in the Remain camp had noticed.
Deborah-Frances-White is a comedian and podcaster. To us, a lot sounded like bits of stand-up routines. Good monologue, unconvincing dialogue. The characters had known each other for years, and shared a house, but Adaego is astonished to find that her roomate had been ‘poor’ as a teenager.
A great deal is a version of a very old joke. It’s frequently attributed to Winston Churchill (often addressing Lady Astor) but also to others including Woodrow Wilson and H.G. Wells. I believe it’s a joke not a quote. While I’m wary of plot spoilers, it is pointed on the flier.
Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?”
Socialite: “A million? Well, I would need to consider. We would have to discuss terms, of course… “
Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for a pound?”
Socialite: ” What kind of woman do you think I am?!”
Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are simply negotiating the price.
The surprise ending was not a surprise. I’d guessed it and in retrospect it’s pointed right at the start.
All four actors were superb. The action to Toxic in Act one was outstanding blocking and lighting. The placing of the cellar in Act two was bizarre. The casting will have production appeal(see Carnage, Abigail’s Party etc). Two couples, so 50/50 casting. One set (if they sort out where to put that cellar). The play text has detailed and in modern terms long character notes and directions. I like that.
In a four star review, Fiona Mountford says there is ‘preachiness’ in Act two. We thought there was preachiness throughout. The script to us betrayed stiffness. It would be improved by changing the interval, moving the cellar, and a strong to savage edit on the monologues in Act two.
***
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
four star
Fiona Mountford, The i ****
three star
Arifa Akbar, Guardian ***
“There are debates on poverty, race, sexuality, appropriation, the hypocrisies of the liberal elite and Brexit. These are often amusing but lack surprise or bite. Because the characterisation is so two-dimensional, we do not believe in this group, or their anger.“
two star
Sam Marlowe, The Stage **
one star
Patrick Marmion, The Mail *
“A sneering gas-guzzling drone of a comedy. Never should you ever consider this.”
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