THE BRINK
Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond
Opened 11 April, 2016
**

The trouble with success, such as that enjoyed by Paul Miller since he took over at the Orange Tree in 2014, is that it creates expectations. Miller has radically expanded the Orange Tree’s dramatic palette and created more than one sensation in doing so, but in such a context a modest play can look flawed. Brad Birch’s latest work is a case in point.

The modesty is, paradoxically, ostentatious. You enter the in-the-round space to a stage bare but for a topsoil of foam chippings and four diffusely lit lighting/seating cubes. Over the 75 minutes of the show the cubes are removed one by one, and at the climax principal character Nick digs down through the chippings. They represent the playing fields of the secondary school at which he teaches... incompetently, judging from what we see. He suffers from recurring dreams about a bomb destroying the school, then finds that apparently there is such a device, a wartime legacy, in the area of school grounds known as the Brink.

Or does he? Or is this all a thumping metaphor for his own loss of control in his professional and personal life? He even begins to conflate various other characters... along the lines, in fact, of the doubled casting. How much can he trust any of those around him? How much can we trust him as a viewpoint character? How much do we care? Not, I’m afraid, all that much. Whether it’s a tale of individual disintegration or a parable for the depersonalisation of contemporary education, there is simply not enough to compel our attention over even such a brief running time.

Birch’s writing begins heavy on comedy and largely continues in the same register, which makes it too difficult for him and director Mel Hillyard to “buy” the rapid descent into darkness at the close. We are too busy chuckling at Vince Leigh’s portrayal of a clutch of annoying gits to invest in Ciarán Owens’ account of Nick’s failure to deal with either his own or his students’ maturity. The Orange Tree is a small venue, but an important one; this production is small, but not important.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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