A production by Scorch Theatre of a somewhat dated play by Alan Ball, the writer of Six Feet Under and American Beauty, which explores the differences between the sexes. The dish of the day was a choice between ‘New Commitment’ and ‘Mindless Promiscuity’ and saw a romantic-novel reading business-woman and a play-boy reading male chauvinist place their all too predictable orders with a gender-shifting waiter/ress.
The stereotypes presented for us on stage felt rather archaic and were tinged therefore, with a sense of irony on the modern stage. Whilst this satirical feel was, I think, unintentional, it did fit rather well with the more absurd elements of the play which allowed social anxieties to be vocalised, power games to be danced out, and genders to be swapped. Such moments were very well directed; the man and woman would, for example, suddenly dance together, spontaneously and involuntarily, parodying their ingrained desire to procreate, despite the emotional distance between them. The trouble was that these two people were just too different to one another, irrelevant of their gender difference, and one found it rather difficult to take the imaginative leap towards accepting that they might get together. Perhaps this was in part down to the casting: Jett Tattersall was very convincing as a headstrong no nonsense business woman but it was hard to believe she would break down over Nick Warnford’s misogynistic, and rather charmless man, whose ‘conquests’ with the ladies one felt would, in reality, remain as fantasies, stuck between the pages of his latest edition of Playboy.
It cannot be denied that there were some very funny moments in this play and Jordi Castillo who played the waiter pulled off the comedy particularly well, but unfortunately overall the play itself was a little cheesy and painfully self-analytical, with an excruciatingly predictable finale.
[Alice Trueman]
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