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The never-ending story
Published 29 November 2007
This minimalist play about a journalist comes across as dull, not innovative
Some Kind of Bliss Trafalgar Studios, London SW1
Perhaps as a reaction against his acclaimed version of Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother, for which the stage was crammed with transvestites, mothers, nuns, daughters and divas, Samuel Adamson has decided to prune everything back for his new play, Some Kind of Bliss. In fact, there is only one person on stage - Rachel (Lucy Briers), a "small-time hack and seeker of minor adventure". The play, which lasts a very long 80 minutes, details the events in Rachel's journey one morning from London Bridge to the house of her interviewee, the pop star Lulu, which we learn is in Greenwich.
On the way, an awful lot happens: Rachel has sex with a young man, gets mugged by a Vietnamese ice-cream seller, steals his ice-cream van and mows down a dog before she finally arrives at Lulu's mansion. We also learn that Rachel, like many of us, can define herself through the men in her life - her charming but rather hapless boyfriend Geoffrey, her formidable former squeeze Dr Felix and her weird Uncle Stevie, who used to run a David Bowie tribute band, all of whom pop up with irritating regularity in the story.
All of this is narrated by Briers, who has a homely smile just like her very famous father's. She is a committed if rather urgent performer who probably knows that the demands of the role are too great for her to encompass. At one point, she lies down on the ground and screams with rather too much conviction.
She is given no help by the director, Toby Frow, who has Briers marching around all over the place, all the time, and seems to be wholly unfamiliar with the concept of stillness on stage.
The designer, Lucy Osborne, gives her even less to work with. Whereas Southwark Fair, Adamson's play last year at the National Theatre, had a fabulous set that nailed the peculiar atmosphere of this stretch of the Thames, here Briers must spend more than an hour tramping up and down a wooden ramp and over some wooden tiles. That's it. There is no sense that she is beside a river, in a city or, frankly, anywhere at all.
Her only props are a leather strap and a steering wheel, which descend from above to indicate a packed Tube train and an ice-cream van respectively. Poor Briers, who is no great mime artist, must first do some unconvincing swerves while driving with the steering wheel and then pretend that her own boot is the dog she has inadvertently run over. Theatre where the audience must do all the work can be fantastically arresting, but this was more like a production that has only two make-believe sticks to rub together, and so fails to create any heat all night long.
There is, however, an interesting undertow to the play. In the olden days, being called a "small-time hack" would have meant that Rachel was a reporter working on small, local, probably crime-based stories for a regional newspaper. Yet she is actually a feature writer for the Daily Mail.
Not very small-time, most people would suggest, but I think Adamson wants us to join in his general condemnation of journalists of her kind. Rachel seems like a decent woman and knows the shortcomings of her speciality, though she is clearly a dab hand at getting crafty observations out of Lulu's hall mirror, her aubergine sofa and any of the other accoutrements that the "pint-sized popstress" has in her domain.
As someone who has done her own fair share of aubergine-sofa-based chats with celebs, I enjoyed watching this sneering commentary, albeit from the lofty vantage point of a fringe theatre, but it belied a certain bitter envy in the playwright. "Is Richard Briers in tonight?" asked someone sitting next to me before the show began. Not likely. With Adamson revealing his celeb-averse colours like this, I suspect that the proud father (and Daily Mail A-lister) is keeping a low profile.
For further info and booking details visit: www.theambassadors.com
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