Writer and Director: Mark Akrill
Joe is waiting at the airport for the arrival of the son he has never met, but the flight is delayed by hours, or by days. Or maybe it doesn’t exist at all.
In Mark Akrill’s work Waiting for Hate Mail, there is an eternal confusion between what is real and what is imagined. Nick Morrison-Baker’s Joe talks of airplane buildings coming to life, of ballerinas dancing on the taxiways. He also talks of receiving hate mail – an email that seems to come from a Neo-Nazi group telling him to watch his back, or a Facebook group of his former students discussing their negative experiences of his work as a drama teacher.
While there is a semblance of not knowing what is true and what is not in there – Joe mentions that members of the group are chastised if they are not negative enough about their experience – the character’s behaviour suggests that there might be some credence to the complaints. Morrison-Baker imbues Joe with a lot of bravado, including fantasising about leaping onto the stage of a theatre production and seducing Hedda Gabler, which suggests he’s not completely comfortable in his own skin and is, perhaps, compensating for something.
What is troubling Joe’s psyche is revealed through reminiscences of conversations with his father (played in voiceover by Akrill) as well as a series of increasingly strained emails from Celeste (voiced by Marcia Mantack), his former university girlfriend who returned to Uganda without telling him that she was pregnant.
The relationship between father and son, which Joe has experienced in one direction but has missed out on in the other, is at the core of the interesting component of Akrill’s piece. But what could be the spine of an intriguing tale is diffused, and confused, by the playwright’s need to throw in so much else in order to fill a 90-minute running time. An increasingly surreal series of airport PA announcements, occasional bouts of frenetic dad dancing, and even an attempt to portray an overly earnest slam poet do little to feed into the story. If anything, they suggest that the grievances felt by Joe’s students may have some justification.
The distractions in the piece ensure that the moments of real clarity, including Joe’s recollections of his father and the tales the man told of his own childhood, never quite deliver the emotional punch they are capable of delivering. Matters aren’t helped by a performance by Morrison-Baker that is always artificially heightened, like a stand-up comedian over-egging the retelling of an anecdote.
Only in the latter stages of the play do we get at something that feels like emotional truth. Even then, Joe’s delivery of a eulogy to his father, delivered in iambic meter, feels more like a playwright wanting to write something that tickles him to do so than it does a character really speaking from the heart.
The mystery of Joe’s son, and why the truth is different from the reality Joe has imagined for himself, contains some nice rhetorical flourishes along with a slight rug-pull of expectation. But ultimately, Waiting for Hate Mail is an interesting character study lost in an overlong sea of party tricks.
Runs until 20 January 2024.
