1 Green Bottle

Former Royal Court writer Nick Cassenbaum’s new play, 1 Green Bottle, bets big. It promises themes of loneliness, control and “the electronic emptiness that lies behind the lens in a generation who have forgotten how to be themselves,” but these are heavy topics, and Cassenbaum struggles to deal with them in a mere 50 minutes.

The young actors play their parts enthusiastically, but it does not seem as though they are wholly confident in what they are supposed to be portraying.

Made up of a series of disjointed and non-descript sketches, 1 Green Bottle only touches on the topics at hand and, in each instance, the message is unclear. For example, in an inventive sketch using paper bags to cover the actors’ faces, the message (perhaps that what we feel ourselves and what we present to others are different) is left unexplained. The vagueness of the sketches does not make room for the complexity of the subjects they aim to discuss, and the play scarcely delves into the topics that it promises to.

It is all too abstract and too heavily reliant on the audience’s ability to swim along with a production that, despite its promises, does not provide any concrete messages. The young actors play their parts enthusiastically, but it does not seem as though they are wholly confident in what they are supposed to be portraying. Their conversations feel arbitrary and meaningless. After a while, their exchanges become repetitive; I left feeling it a shame that the young actors had not really had a chance to display their talent.