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 Nuclear War

Nuclear War
by Simon Stephens

The Waste Land
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Let's put aside the play text  introduction by playwright Simon Stephens to the twelve pages of the Nuclear War script - quite why he wants to set himself up as a paragon for playwrights who knows how to work with a director and actors while he says others, by  implication, don't, we know not.

Suffice to say, he sets out a working methodology which doesn't feel particularly original to us. But at the same time we may have whetted your appetite to buy or borrow the play text to find out what the hell we're talking about.

And if you go to Nuclear War expecting bombs and confrontation between world powers, you may be disappointed. For, as Simon Stephens has correctly pointed out on his twitter feed, you're more likely to get that in real life. But "Guys. it's a metaphor."

Yet we must concede that Nuclear War is kinda interesting in a world where we are increasingly bombarded through technology with disembodied voices. And our own individual, as well as Britain's, place in the world, feels constantly in flux and increasingly indefinable.

Ostensibly, this is play about the loss of a loved one and  a day in the life on the seventh anniversary of time spent at a hospital bedside. A day atomized into moments filtered through the mind of an unnamed woman,"All I can hear/Are the thoughts scratched onto the inside of my head".

The room is bare, the props stark (designer Chloe Lamford). The audience is seated around the walls, so that when we hear the words, "I can't help feeling you're in my room ... Watching me.", one immediately sees the faces of others in the audience watching.

The voice comes through in a pre-recorded narration by an unnamed Scottish woman played by Maureen Beattie who sometimes breaks into "live" speech varying the mixture of textures. 

Also watching are a four-strong chorus - Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Gerrome Miller, Andrew Sheridan, Beatrice Scirroccchi. They whisper, they chant, they sing. They are like living furniture handing the woman, for instance, a cup or a biscuit.

They weave shapes and populate the mundane scenes of city life on a train, in a coffee shop and more fantastical underworld-type scenes where they mutate into black hooded prisoners or hounds like creatures out of Greek mythology.

A red heater also glows with red bars and the woman mounts a large black box amplifier, with trailing cables, at one point. She builds a shrine of bricks lit by an old fashioned fringed table lamp with a china cat and discarded flowery porcelain tea cups nearby, all seemingly from another era.

The USP (unique selling point) of Nuclear War is supposedly that the playwright is letting the director Imogen Knight, who is also a choreographer and movement director, and the actors to use the text in whatever order they choose and to bring choreography as an extra layer of meaning.

In the end, the process doesn't make much difference to the audience watching this brief piece, however much it makes a difference for those involved.  At 45 minutes, there is no danger of the piece outstaying its welcome and it does have a visceral quality with washes of red, yellow and blue light from lighting designer Lee Curran.

There are cryptic moments. For example when the chorus puts stockings bank robbery style over their heads and stuff mandarins into their mouths. But there is a story there and at one point Andrew Sheridan with headphones round his neck becomes the embodiment of the lost love.

TLT is not the only reviewer to have thought of TS Eliot in connection with the text - we saw it the day after press night.

The choreography of the chorus clad all in black does meld with atomized environment of the woman, the never being able to turn the clock  back in the striking image of grains of sand never able to fly back together after sandcastles are knocked down. And we feel the momentum of the city, no longer a whole but filled with new people and elements, always pushing forward, never looking back.

This all has an intuitive quality but we certainly won't pretend this is a piece that will suit all tastes. However it does also have an affective, sometimes threatening, sometimes poignant lyrical quality on every level and it's an amber light for the depiction of a world losing its nucleus and disappearing into darkness and movement.