** "Lowest common denominator" play about night-out rituals
This four-hander feels like a student piece, which is a worrying augury since it's the first production by a new professional company.
Two young men and two young women go out for a night of drinking and clubbing in a northern town, then go home together. Each consists of one cool one and one less so – the lad dim but lairy, the lass a wallflower. Naturally, the sharp fella pairs off with the wallflower and the sassy girl with the pillock. Meanwhile, a pair of serial killers, the "Pullers", are terrorising the region by killing nightclubbers. A series of clues and red herrings are strewn across the 80 minutes, hinting that any of the four might be the villain.
CryHelp Productions go unambiguously for entertainment – the phrase I quoted in the header above comes from a member of the company. But while some thought has gone into the piece, neither the writing nor the performance comes out with much more than truisms and archetypes. The play has apparently been in gestation for some six years, and the writer is now in his thirties, so one might expect a little more in the way of content than is there. It works fine on its own terms, but those terms are excessively modest given the company's ambitions.
Written for divento.com
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
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