Writer: Lally Katz
Director: James Christensen
There is a sense of the benign nightmare about Lally Katz’s dreamlike triptych of playlets that comprise The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy. Like many dreams, facts and assertions become malleable concepts until one is not sure where the truth ends, if indeed it ever started.
We are first greeted by Gassan Abdulrazek’s overgrown schoolboy Jeremy, returning home from school only to find that his family are absent from the house, and his only companion is a man-sized, pot-bellied teddy who introduces himself as the Apocalypse Bear.
Remi King’s delivery as the Bear carries the sort of mildness that can be intimidating in its lack of overt threat. And while there is an air of benevolence – the Bear makes Jeremy an after-school snack as the student chats online to a friend in Zagreb – the questions with which he prompts Jeremy to open up suggest a more malign purpose.
There is copious use of the f-word slur to describe gay men, suggesting perhaps Jeremy is not comfortable with his own sexuality. When such language is used one would hope it were balanced with a deeper explanation of the motivations by its use, but Katz seems disinterested in such exploration. Instead, we get an exploration of Jeremy’s feeling about his drama club, and an exploration of a magical subculture found in a North London wood. Like many dreams, the meaning is elusive.
A similar atmosphere pervades the second piece, in which Siddy’s Holloway Sonya is both a young schoolgirl, an English expatriate living in America and struggling with the Pledge of Allegiance while worrying about whether the cool kids like her, and a divorcée with memories of a husband. Again, King gives the otherwise impassive Bear a hint of threat. But as the first piece depends on Abdulrazek, the piece relies upon the performance of Holloway to sell the whole concept. It’s a task both actors clearly relish, and give a much-needed sense of depth to an otherwise superficial script.
That experience follows through into the final third of the play, as Jeremy and Sonya – whether the same characters or not – are now a married couple whose only squabble is over which of them should take the bins out.
Abdulrazek and Holloway spark off each other well here, with King’s Bear largely absent. The sense of dreaming is more explicit here, as Sonya recounts an office-based dream with elements of macabre fantasy to her husband.
The problem with this, as with the whole of The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy, is that other people’s dreams are rarely interesting. That is the case here, too. Despite measured performances from the cast elevating the work to the level it never quite deserves, Lally Katz’s play becomes the type of dream that is easy to forget the instant we wake.
Continues until 22 July 2023
