DRUNKENNESS AND THE DARK
The studio at Hampstead has been on a roll just lately, with clever and emotionally sincere performs : FOLK, RAVENSCOURT, THE ANIMAL KINGDOM et al. It nurtures new playwrights, offers actors scope and problem, invitations NHS and emergency employees in for a tenner. It didn’t need to be stripped of its public funding simply because somebody thought Hampstead sounded, politically, an excellent place to kick.
That is one other sharp, pared-down studio manufacturing: in 95 minutes Joe White delivers a essentially painful two-hander about youthful alcoholism and the catastrophe of colliding addictions. We watch two lovers, over an unsure wavering timeline, who can neither management nor bear in mind their lives and actual selves: we get flashes, snapshots of their assembly, coupling, celebrating, combating, betraying.
It’s cleverly constructed in its time-shifting, fairly like Nick Payne’s CONSTELLATIONS (although don’t take heed to me about that: I used to be one of many few who didn’t like its showy cleverness). However right here the blackouts and timeshifts and crossed-confused recollections of actuality are put within the service of stark illustration of what habit to getting off your face does to folks. There are two sensible, fiercely recognized performances : Alex Austin is the extra susceptible geeky one, an artwork scholar; Rebecca Humphries, posher, entitled, swishing round in a strappy costume and afghan coat falling off one shoulder, is horny and egocentric and horribly deadly. That is obvious from the primary second when she drags him away for a drink as an AA assembly is about to begin, as a result of he’s solely simply thrown up his final load in a passing bin so – “It’s medication, one in twenty folks die, going chilly turkey” . She additionally plans to have intercourse with him, as a result of that’s what she does when she is, as she says a number of instances, her true self. She is the basic drunk who believes she was born three drinks underneath par and can solely be actual when she’s had them.
Their relationship is an object-lesson in AA’s recommendation that you simply shouldn’t strike up relationships in restoration, and for a lot of the first hour Humphries’ offers a fabulously dislikeable evocation of the toxic self-absorption and cruelty of the profession drunk. Which I’ve to say I discovered a little bit of an issue: there’s a nice line between brilliantly loathsome and unwatchable. Although some critics (male) discovered a rom-com meet-cute sweetness in it at instances, and White creates a sketchy back-story excuse a few well-known father who wasn’t there for her ,and being despatched to boarding faculty at six. He additionally offers her some beguiling verbal flights of fancy . That helped a bit.
Austin as the person is much less poisonous, eagerer, scruffily hopeless and beguiled by her, however satirically he’s the one who does sooner or later within the switchback timeline get sober. Except that’s one other fantasy. He too is the one with some understanding of affection as a present of appreciation fairly than a shag-happy snatching of enjoyable: his line about the way you “carry” with you folks you have got cherished is on the core of the play, and underlines its sorrowful message that carrying a fellow-addict is tough, maybe not possible.
“I would love you, or perhaps I’m simply drunk” she observes as soon as; and one other startling second of their courtship comes when, as they raid a church for communion-wine the person says “you recognize we’re simply consuming buddies? I’m going to neglect you”. However later he accuses her of getting mentioned that to him. Brains are broken.
Arduous, intelligent, truthful. And generally humorous: there was laughing round me at instances (Austin is bodily good in clowning, dancing moments, and Humphries deft within the fantasy speeches). However it was the youthful viewers who had been laughing, recognizing. Not the dad or mum technology .
Field workplace Hampsteadtheatre.com. To 10 December
