Writer: Farah Najib
Director: Jess Barton
A mystery at No. 61 Laurel House is the focus of Farah Najib’s narrative play at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre, a stench that brings a group of neighbours together to ponder its origin. Even when the maggots arrive, inveigling their way through the building, it proves impossible to convince the local council that anything is amiss. The intimate simplicity of Maggots, directed by Jess Barton, seems to confirm the audience and the residents’ suspicions very quickly, but Najib’s drama still finds the good that comes from it.
Structurally, Maggots is highly conscious of its own theatrical nature; the cast greet the audience at the beginning, explain that they won’t be playing ‘characters’ and even claim not to be ‘actors’ but part of a conscious process of storytelling that blends a factual event and some elaborated fictions that Najib weaves around it. Divided into nine chapters, each announced by the narrator-performers, the show shares the story between the three cast members and allows character voices to move between them while still building a sense of the community in which this tragedy takes place.
What begins as a puzzle soon becomes a calm reflection on the breakdown of process and of neighbourhoods to take care of their single people. What happens across the one and three-quarter years of this play is a systematic failure of residents to persist, of deadpan and chronically unhelpful council workers to care enough to follow up on reports by members of the building and of a community too afraid to knock in case they bother the inhabitant of No. 61. What makes Najib’s writing so interesting is the composed presentation of events with no obvious judgement or blame apportioned to one particular grouping, making the collective sense of failure even stronger.
And while Najib lets the audience reach their only conclusion about the right thing to do and whether we would behave any differently, Maggots is ultimately a character piece, filling in the factual happenings with a lively story of four different households, individually drawn and variously crossing paths through the story until they find the sense of community that Laurel House has always lacked. There is real warmth in Najib’s writing, whether describing the scented candle-loving single mother or the kindly care home worker dancing in her living room. These characters come alive in cultural reference points, from obsessively watching EastEnders to changing light bulbs and listening to Magic FM.
Performed by a three-strong cast, duties are evenly spread as each narrator carries the story forward, sometimes line by line, while Najib’s writing demands quick transitions to lots of different theatrical devices, adding telephone calls, an online forum and internal monologue to the storytelling approach to build on straightforward character dialogue and description which the actors deliver with comic flare.
Maggots occasionally struggles with pacing as any show will that solves the mystery two-thirds of the way through but then delivers three more chapters, and while the self-consciousness of the narration is an interesting frame, it is never clear why that deliberate anti-immersion technique is so vital to this story. Yet the whole piece comes to life with real imagination and a hint of existential sadness about whether the fate of No. 61 might be ours too.
Runs until 10 February 2024
