Writers and Directors: Alexander and Helen Millington
Alexander Millington is probably the unluckiest performer at the Camden Fringe. Last year his brilliant show I Heart Michael Ball attracted only four audience members to the Etcetera Theatre press performance while his latest piece with wife Helen Millington, A Caravan Named Desire, earns five, including three reviewers and one of the Camden People’s Theatre team. But the Millingtons are making interesting and entertaining theatre that deserves to be seen more widely and hopefully, the rest of the run will give them the audience this new show really deserves.
In order to gather research data and to write this show Alexander under the pseudonym ‘Gary’ goes to see a sex worker who operates from a caravan in an unspecified location. When performer Charlotte fails to turn up, Alexander’s wife Helen has to reluctantly step in, discovering more about her husband as the story unfolds. As fact and fiction blur, their marriage implodes.
A Caravan Named Desire cleverly blends meta and fourth-wall-breaking approaches to storytelling with recreated scenes between the semi-fictional Gary and sex worker Crystal. As Millington demonstrated with his show last year, the management of different realities and playing with audience expectations are all part of the complex approaches to audience engagement that characterise his theatre-making. Here, a play within a play structure is complemented by personal narration, time leaps and cuts to suggest a production going wrong by degrees while pushing the viewer to look in the wrong direction.
In principle Millington claims he set out to write “a show about sex… sort of,” nominally creating duologues between Gary and Crystal to discover more about the professional relationship they develop and then, across a supposed six-month period, to draw them together. But A Caravan Named Desire is actually about marriage with the constructed reality versions of Alexander and Helen coming apart on stage as their deliberately shoddy and on book, thrown together play leads to greater revelations and big questions about the difficulty of maintaining a long-term relationship as well as the need to seek physical comfort elsewhere.
Running at just 50 minutes, this show doesn’t quite get around to fully articulating and answering those questions, dramatising the process of realisation and the conflict that ensues. It doesn’t yet dig deeper into the marital questions proposed by the scenario the play creates. For example, why is the stage version of Alexander drawn towards Crystal, allowing the boundaries he set himself to be slowly eroded to the point of risking his marriage? And what does Helen intend to do about it? The final moment comes too soon and there is far more to elicit from the multilayered scene in which Alexander tries to get his wife to act out a sex scene between his character and Crystal.
Helen Millington is excellent as the put-upon spouse, deliberately playing down her performance to seem like an unhappy stand-in as the truth slowly dawns, while Alexander Millington mixes the hosting of the show with the growing shame about his behaviour that results in a meaningful moment of self-reflection. But A Caravan Named Desire needs a stronger conclusion as these different realities collide and it also deserves a much bigger audience.
Runs until 12 August 2023
Camden Fringe runs until 27 August 2023
