Review Victory Condition

Victory Condition
by Chris Thorpe

Different Planes
https://royalcourttheatre.co,uk

This is the kind of play you'll be either for or against. A sweeping statement, TLT and her four wheeled companion know, but this is a binary play you'll (ok, probably) either love or hate.

But to proceed. A man and woman (we never get to know names) unlock the door of their modern, pretty plush flat (design by Chloe Lamford) and wheel in their brightly coloured, plastic mould suitcases.

They go about unpacking both their luggage and their minds in an apparent stream-of-consciousness.

He (Jonjo O'Neill), it appears, is either an assassin or, influenced by a computer game he starts to play later on, imagines he is one. She (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), more plausibly for the world TLT inhabits, seems to work for an advertising agency.

Their minds range over multiple images and subjects which obviously colonize their minds - his more intent on warfare and spaceships. Her thoughts concentrates more on her personal frailty and the possibility of collapse in a public place and the abuse of a trafficked child.

O'Neill's Northern Irish  accent and Duncan-Brewster's London accent gives some variation - even though there are glimpses of the Ukraine in O'Neill's monologue, the talk of barricades also has resonance for Northern Ireland.

Duncan-Brewster's image of collapsing, on her back and helpless on an underground station platform with a brain haemorrhage, is a potent image. However, the audience is never given the chance to connect with much in the intercut monologues.

The couple (the audience is given enough to work out they are a couple) move around the well-organized flat doing whatever they feel needs doing and consuming whatever takeaway food and images that they want to consume. 
 
Our expectation was that something would happen to bring a recognizable narrative rather than an attempt  solely to bring thoughts on to the stage - albeit in fully formed words and sentences.

The overall impression was of a dream where you see yourself rather than view the world from inside your own head and you know that it's all wrong. 

There also seem to be enormous assumptions. Our first thought was that they worked as airplane stewards. Looking at the play text, it appears they've come back from a holiday in Greece. And that's part of the problem.

Why put something like Greece, which does have a resonance, in play text stage directions  when it has has no bearing on what the audience members see and hear in the performance?

TLT wouldn't always make this point about the differencce between the printed and performed script but here at least one person involved in the production is assuming that everyone thinks in the same way she or he does.

The same goes for the title of the two internal monologues - Victory Condition. There was no clue in the piece TLT watched as to what this term means - an assumption that everyone in the audience must know gaming terms. However TLT can't pretend that knowing this term now makes the play itself any more comprehensible.

The blurb says Victory Condition is  "An attempt to get to grips with the fact that everything happens at once. And to see if there’s anything we can do about it." Maybe. There's a lot of maybes with this play.

Maybe it's an attempt to make some kind of correlation between infinite psychic space and the non finite nature of computer games. Maybe it's a tease but if so, it's a rather mind-numbing, frustrating and ultimately boring one.

Maybe writer Chris Thorpe will collect all the Victory Ambition reviews and turn them into some sort of play. TLT and her engineered companion or a TLT reviewing colleague would still turn up 😉, but in the meantime it's a red/amber light.

Review B

B
by Guillermo Calderón

Rebel, Rebel
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

To B or not B, that is the question at the centre of Chilean playwright's Guillermo Calderón's absurdist comedy drama.

 Two young women anarchists, Marcela (Aimée Ffion-Edwards) and Alejandra (Danusia Samal) rendezvous in a borrowed apartment ready to make a token protest against a nearby financial institutution.

Each, it emerges has a backstory, making their revolt against the state a more serious affair than their seemingly inept steps towards rebellion.

However, while their bickering turns to the ridiculous, the arrival of a ultimately more devilish partner-in-crime (or liberation, depending on your point of view) ultimately pushes the story towards tragedy rather than comedy.

In spite of the duo's disavowal of any kind of hierarchy, the older masked stranger (Paul Kaye) pulls rank, claims their plan needs his approval and orders more extreme action.

In the meantime, ambushed by a nosy neighbour Carmen (Sarah Niles), the women concoct inconsistent stories on the hoof to explain their presence and to keep her away, in vain, from their preparations.

B appears to be a small play straining allegorically to cover large swathes of Chilean, South American and Spanish history, alongside an international perspective.

However, in the end, the play falls between  a number of stools. It states rather too emphatically the differences and connections, benign and malign, between two generations of would-be revolutionaries.

More interestingly, at one point it seems to start to touch on the generation gap and the nature of packaged artistic creation in an increasingly globalized world.

Even so, it lacks the courage of its convictions and becomes what is seeks to criticize -  a dead end world tips over into a dead end drama.

Each character at various times has a monologue to explain their motivations linked by expanded two, three and four-handed scenes.

The action takes place on Chloe Lamford's stone and plywood set, caged in scaffolding, and festooned with black balloons. There's also  a neat trick with t-shirts (albeit there appear to be how-to videos on the internet - don't click on the link if you don't want a spoiler).

However there are moments when Sam Pritchard's production feels as if it has become a little too enamoured by visuals such as the masks, the black balloonsm a red and white striped gift box and other quips.

Taken at face value (B is translated from the Spanish by William Gregory), it remains a play of separate parts, speeches and jokes rather than a rigorous exploration, comic or serious. 

All in all, this is an "almost" play. A would-be political and artistic allegory, "This is supposed to be a party. Good story though."

It's also an terrorist satire where secret code insures nobody calls a spade a spade. A drama where an attempt to use the media short circuits and the only appreciative audience for the aspiring revolutionaries appears to be the prison population.

A comedy where a pen is misused but even then does not fulfil the skewed function to which it's put. The self-appointed terrorist chief literally becomes a talking head speaking at times in the rhythms of Once In A Lifetime and the young women intermittently sound like some anarchist Alias Smith & Jones who never want to kill anyone.

Despite some modern terrorist references, the play does have an old-fashioned vibe - it did send TLT and her motorised comrade scuttling to Google to find out if GK Chesterton, author of The Man Who Was Thursday, an Edwardian thriller about an imploding anarchist cell, is known in Chile and the Spanish speaking world.

It turns out  a conference on him was held in Chile this year. And the writer is popular enough in the Spanish language to merit a landmark copyright ruling in Spain.

If it is an influence, there's nothing wrong with using an early 20th century text as inspiration. However this is a play with an anarchic structure which never quite follows through on its scattergun lines of thought. It's an amber light.