Following on from last summer’s
production (revived at Christmas)
50
Ways To Leave Your Lover, the Bush has once again commissioned a
themed evening of sketches and playlets from a team of young writers,
this time including Joel Horwood, James Graham and a couple of names
more familiar as actors, Zawe Ashton and Michelle Terry. It has already
been seen at a clutch of venues around the country, including the
Latitude festival, and is standard summer fare: not too long (only a
whisker over an hour), not too demanding and generally affirmative.
Or is it? The idea may be that everybody makes an inadvertent fool of
themselves on occasion so it’s nothing to get hung up about is a
laudable one, but building an entire show out of such incidents can
arouse ambivalent feelings in those of us who can’t always achieve what
Henri Bergson called the “momentary anaesthesia of the heart” necessary
to appreciate comedy of embarrassment. The uncomplicatedly warmer
segments include Felix Scott’s warm-up, where the hated
audience-participation ritual morphs into a moment that allows him to
mock us all, “You’re dancing to Cher!”, and a scene in which he and
Hugh Skinner play middle-class gents at a public-school reunion who
regress to squabbling brats. But some odd notes are struck, not least
with the first lengthy section, in which Kathryn Drysdale’s character
recalls in some detail losing control of her bowels in a
natural-childbirth pool. A later monologue in which Drysdale recounts
in brief an entire lifetime of faux pas, and especially a drunken
not-best-man’s speech from Scott which turns suddenly pitch-black, are
the best written pieces. More formal episodes are punctuated by
incidents posted to the actual suddenlossofdignity.com web site by
members of the public.
The greatest asset among the four performers is Katie Lyons, who flings
herself with reckless abandon into every portrayal, whether it be a
drunken Bristolian on the predatory pull in a club or an
audience-ogling rendition of an “it’s not about me, honest” song about
being unable to score with anyone. But the show as a whole needs to
cohere more tonally as well as thematically, and whilst of course the
Bush are allowed to have fun like everyone else, one tends to expect
fun of a higher calibre.
Written for the Financial
Times.