The Stage

Play On Words

Published Thursday 7 January 2010 at 11:40 by Derek Smith

With a running time only just over an hour, a small, but obviously focused cast need to be on its mettle straight away if it is to grab, then hold on to, this intimate audience’s attention. Fortunately, co-founder of Three’s Company, Tom Crawshaw, is manning the lights and setting the evening’s somewhat anarchic tone, intriguingly breaking down established technical boundaries with shouted cues and withering remarks to cast and audience alike.

Making its London transfer after a successful run at the Pleasance Dome in Edinburgh, this production may, somewhat scientifically, have been created to explore audience interaction in theatre, but it’s a work that isn’t shy of including a few good gags too. To their great credit, Michael Grady-Hall, as Fred, and Yaz Al-Shaater, as Eddie, build an intense, ultimately fractured relationship that maintains the interest throughout.

There’s certainly no doubting their enthusiasm for the project, Al-Shaater is a versatile, confident talent and Grady-Hall is in serious danger of busting a blood vessel in a terrifying, but impressive tirade near the show’s close. Toying intensely at times, with words, grammar and punctuation, you sense though that with a less able cast and lengthier show, there would be a danger of some audiences lapsing into a semi-coma. But, as it stands, it’s just about the perfect format, although for a work studying audience interaction, some admittedly short periods of onstage self-indulgence leave you feeling a bit isolated. The ploy of placing fifth columnists in the house also seems a rather dated tactic for such a clearly inventive company. That said, this is short, sharp and for the most, quite intriguing. To continue the English analogy, the time spent at the Tristan Bates felt anything but a sentence.