Review Twitstorm

Twitstorm
by Chris England

Watch The Birdie
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

There are plays with plenty of talent on board which give tantalising glimpses of taking an original route. Except there's a chickening out or a failure to recognize the potential of the material and the plays  fall back on reheated plot points and gags.

Such a play, in our opinion, is Twitstorm. In fact Twitstorm is two plays wound awkwardly together.

One is an obvious TV-show-host-gets-embroiled-in-a-mistweeting-scandal. The other is what happens when the sponsor-an-African-child monthly direct debit is transformed into a living, breathing strapping lad who turns up unexpectedly on the doorstep. If you were switching channels to see what was on, which one would you choose?

Guy Manton (Jason Merrells) is the host of a TV panel show with a large following and the almost sure possibility of the format being exported to the US. His agent Rupert (Chris England, also Twitstorm's playwright) is handling the business side and it looks like the Stateside show will keep Guy as  host but jettison other long-term colleagues.

Guy's success is bolstered by wife Bex (Claire Goose) who is  a mildly successful chicklit authoress and in demand as the subject of women's interest magazine features. Even so, they suffer from the same first world problems as many couples, trying desperately to get off stage son Olly into the school of their choice.

Like many celebrities, Guy has someone else to manage his twitter account, long-term friend and show scriptwriter Neil (Justin Edwards) who does it all from his laptop which he carries around. It therefore ends up in Guy and Bex's home  - where Ike (Tom Moutchi) has previously arrived unexpectedly from the African state of Benin  - on the day of an end-of-series barbecue thrown for the show's staff.

We did laugh intermittently but there was little to surprise us in what was, in the end, an overwrought script. Frankly the celebrity who finds himself in the midst of the eponymous Twitstorm, partly because he doesn't seem to want to understand the new-fangled social media, would be, at the very least, very last century if Twitter had been invented then.

But shaming can come equally as an audio or video recording. Twitter is magnified publication. Yes, the Twitter beast has to be fed, just as once did the mass readership tabloid beast - but the material has to be there in the first place.

The most precarious and excruciating Twitter shaming has often been corporate man or woman with a personal account and unintentional 140 character or less ambiguity. Twitter also often gets exercised by events that start on that cutting edge part of modern broadcast technology, the radio. 

The African child story did pique our interest. However, in trying to have a twist that the African is not as unknowing as he seems, Twitstorm unfortunately turns an out-of-date, if it were ever in-date, idiot savant story into what many would consider an equally, if not more, offensive belligerent stereotype.  

There is a fine cast, given pacey direction by Jonathan Lewis, for the laboured plot, in spite of an attempt to bring in couched political and historical points of reference.

But why have such references if, for example, most of the audience is unlikely to have an in-depth knowledge of the history of Benin and you need to drill a bit further on Google to discover any Ike Eisenhower connection to Ike? (Ike Eisenhower was the first American president to recognise the independence of Benin). 

We were prepared to give Twitstorm leeway at the interval wondering if there would be an inspired  second act but it seemed to rely on the old implicit "it was all a dream" or "he's been driven mad by the whole affair" to explain some unlikely plot twists and rants. 

This felt like a play that may have started with the title. Then there seems to have been a lack of recognition of a possibly much stronger story in which Twitter either was unnecessary or  a minor part and an attempt to combine the two ended up with some unintended consequences. Oh dear, a bit like an unintended mistweet and so it's a red/amber light.

Review A Level Playing Field

A Level Playing Field

by Jonathan Lewis

Another Brick In The Wall
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

When TLT was a mere snip of a thing, exams came round once a year in stately parade and a timetable clash was unthinkable either in reality or in accounts of fictional schooldays in literature, film and TV.

Now TLT and her jolly jeep sidekick learn, according to A Level Playing Field, such clashes are commonplace and the tip of an iceberg in the Brave New World of mass higher education - with casualties.

As schools push kids in a lunatic drive for results, students not only have to swot for exams but suffer an “isolation” period to avoid cheating during a staggering of the exam timetable.

OK, it may not not quite be Steve McQueen (Senior) enduring the punishment block in The Great Escape prisoner of war camp. However,  according to playwright Jonathan Lewis, it does bear all the hallmarks of unwarranted punishment. Already over-stressed students, innocent of any misdemeanour, deprived of addictive  mobiles and computers, for the sins of exam timetabling.

A Level Playing Field, the playwright reports in the programme and elsewhere, is the first of three plays presenting A levels from the perspective of students, parents and teachers in schools characterised as “exam factories” in the quest for league table dominance.

Often rough-edged, the result of workshops with pupils, this may be an innovative interactive genre, a co-operative mix between the professional and the unadulterated voices of the subjects. All the students are played by non professional actors, each with the chance to take centre stage.

In the first act, an apparent  timetable staffing error leaves eleven all-white representative private school teenagers unsupervised in the "isolation" room, normally the music room.  Without an authority figure,  they are left to regulate themselves, almost like guinea pigs or white mice watched by the audience.  

Papered with cloned photocopied images of film star Nicholas Cage (Cage, geddit?!) "looking mental" as a school jape by  wannabe black, Aldous (Jack Bass), the room fills with a diverse set of pupils including Albanian immigrant Zachir (A J Lewis), swottish scholarship girl Bella (Eve Delaney), nervy  Johnny Hook (Jojo Macari), pot smoking Cal (Joe Taylor) and intense JJ (Christian Hines).

These are not the rebels of  the 1980s’ film The Breakfast Club but all of them, barely off stage during the entire pressure-cooker situation, are seeking coveted A* grades for entry to a top university.  

Meanwhile through open windows, we become, at first dimly and then clearly aware, that all is not well in the outside world.

Inevitably, reflecting the situation forced on them, they clash, while revealing their stories sequentially and interspersing the action with surreal monologue moments reflecting their psychic space.  It sometimes tips over into mouthpiece drama with obvious soap opera and literary cliché but there are also flashes of playful self awareness.

Nevertheless, it struck TLT perhaps an out and out satiric style might have introduced a more sharp edged varied pace, especially in the first act, with less shoutiness and schematic conflict.

Yet it’s the arrival of an adult authority figure belatedly in the second act with his own secrets which lights the dramatic fuse and overcomes the uncertainty of tone.  Also focussing the performances of other cast members, Joe Layton, star of BBC3’s Tatau, as young teacher Mr Preston, takes  the weight of the play on his shoulders, delivering a compelling,  precise performance. And directed by Chris Popert who also introduces video, put together by Roland Waters, more successfully at the beginning than the end, there are some neat visual touches, farce, moments of pathos and irony in the second act.

In the end, TLT and her sidekick, knowing all about exam pressure having to pass a yearly MOT ;), resort to a nineteenth century cliché to describe the play  – a curate’s egg. And it’s strangely apt, originating from a Punch cartoon where a humble young curate,served a rotten egg at the table of his Bishop but desperate not to offend theauthority figure whose patronage he needs, pronounces it “excellent in parts”. In other words, a little patchy but an amber light for an interesting experimental patchwork.

PS The class of 2015 stand and fall together so it seems only correct to name the rest of the cast: Rowena (India Opzoomer), Eleanor (Lydia Williams), Talia (Isabella Caley), Louis (Finlay Stroud) and Twink (Elsa Perryman Owens) who, if we did not imagine it, at one stage inserted a subtle impersonation of a certain famous politician.