Review Escape The Scaffold

Student friendship and rivalry turn to expediency and ruthlessness after graduation, Peter Barker discovers in a passionate new play. 

Escape The Scaffold
By Titas Halder

Haunted House
https://theatre503.com/

Flitting backwards and forwards through time, this psychological thriller follows the lives of Aaron (Trieve Blackwood-Cambridge), Marcus (Charlie Reston) and Grace (Rosie Sheehy) from three very different but inextricably-linked flat-share students to a future of skewed lives.

Titas Halder’s witty and dark second play Escape The Scaffold consolidates the promise of his debut piece Run The Beast Down. As with the previous drama, the playwright in Escape The Scaffold explores both individual psyches and a breakdown in society.  

The two men are love rivals yet also at times firm friends. Aaron is the idealist, a student activist, while public school-educated ambitious Marcus is fixated on his career and both struggle for the affections of artist Grace.

At first their future seems filled with potential  but student promise and companionship eventually disintegrate into the need for self preservation within a dystopian state.

The double time scale exposes and leads the audience to trace and understand what the two men and one woman once were and the people they become.

Aaron returns to the student digs of his younger days to find Grace and Marcus now a married couple - and homeowners both of the flat and a sinister cellar. Remaining the idealist, Aaron finds himself a wanted man on the run from the forces of a totalitarian state where he is viewed as a dangerous subversive.

Meanwhile Marcus, once the university student union president, has become more than just part of the establishment. He is a spook willing to undertake torture under orders from the authoritarian regime.
  
Halder's absorbing script demonstrates a talent to build suspense  with pungent, even lyrical language while threading together two separate periods of time and introducing a seam of dark humour.

Driven by love, ambition, ego, idealism and treachery, each of his protagonists ultimately prove questionable characters. Sheehy gives Grace, forced to choose between the two men,  an initial appeal until her personality hardens and coarsens over the course of time. Reston's Marcus, honed by an exclusive education, manages to combine the appalling with a compelling vitality.

Hannah Price's assured, pacey direction, never lets the momentum flag as the repercussions of the spy state impact on the trio and audience. Nonetheless, amid all this, Halder's own persuasive humour is allowed to  emerge.

The versatile, dilapidated Victorian house set of Mark Bailey also allows the actors themselves to change the set, while alongside lighting by Katy Morison and sound by Chris Bartholomew,  the homely eventually changes into horrific. 

Escape the Scaffold has flair and wit in character and plotting, braiding past and future together, all laced with a sharp twist of horror and deserving a green light.

Review Run The Beast Down

The latest member of the TLT community is Peter Barker, who worked on local newspapers before stints at ITN, UK and China news agency branches and on free commuter paper Metro. He now reviews a compelling new play as a City slicker fallen on tough times goes native in London's feral landscape.  

Run The Beast Down
by Titas Halder

Brush With The Wild Side
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

As many a London resident will tell you, foxes are a menace; unwelcome in the city, tearing into rubbish bags, looking for hidden trifles and trotting the sidewalk with a cheek that makes you want to call the hunt -  if only Tony Blair hadn't banned it, damn him!

But it’s the fox within the man that Titas Halder’s new play ‘Run the Beast Down’ pursues at the Finborough Theatre.

Arrive early in the auditorium and the inventive soundscape from on-stage DJ Chris Bartholomew working decks and computers with virtuosity will greet you.

After that, the main man, Charlie, appears in what is otherwise essentially a one-man play  -- played with vulpine good looks and energy by the charismatic Ben Aldridge.

He is truly a creature of these times, probably a sure bet for a successful life with a loving partner, a high-flying job (in the City) and the sought-after London apartment. 

OK, he may also be a TK Maxx kind of guy; clad in cheap black jeans, cheaper black T-shirt and bold-coloured sneakers. But can you tell from the outside what the man is -- what motivates him, what has shaped him, what he is?

And will he beat the pack chasing him, or get cornered?

Our rummaging through Charlie’s rubbish begins with the unexpected woes which descend on him all at once -- he loses his job and has been - sort of -  burgled. At least his girlfriend has left him, taking almost everything, apart from the curtains.

Insomniac Charlie is the filter through which we experience his increasingly bizarre environment and the people around him. Writer Halder demonstrates considerable flair, building the momentum of a fantastical mental and physical journey with a poetic wit. In Aldridge’s Charlie he certainly finds an actor who can rise to the task -- his transformations of mood and movement are seamlessly defined.

The mystery at the heart of the play, the threats, whether real or imagined, and Charlie's metamorphosis are intriguing. Yet, it must be said at the same time, he is just another one of those middle class 20-something London guys you see on the tube whom you'd assume has a good job and comes from a relatively privileged background. So he remains neither quite heroic enough to be admired nor twisted enough to be... well, admired.

But we can pity him and, when he dissolves, there is literally and metaphorically something of everybody about him.

As Charlie unravels, we see him maniacally writing a label for each new scene on the floor of the stage until, finally, there is little space left untouched. The bare plinth set, designed by Anthony Lamble, with a rear wall of thick upright metal tubes and LED lighting,  is ultimately not even covered with words, just a crowded jumble of letters.

Like the set, the lighting from Rob Mill is versatile, unintrusive, without gimmickry. Equally the electronic score orchestrated by Bartholomew and sound by Ben and Max Kingham  complements the pace of the play and makes a significant contribution to the evening.

Director Hannah Price keeps the feral drama tightly focussed, skilfully maintaining the precarious balance of Charlie's flamboyant high-wire act which must reach the end of the line before he really crashes and burns. This 80-minute debut from writer Titas Halder, developed at Canterbury's Marlowe Theatre, emerges polished and sharp in Price's production with Aldridge's gripping  performance all deserving a green light.