Writer: Olivia Mace
Director: Simon Naylor
A poem is repeated throughout Olivia Mace’s award-winning and swaggeringly ambitious A Pineapple 
speculating that a year or so after a war no-one will be able to identify who was the winner or the loser. The likelihood that decisions reached without lived experience or learned knowledge will be flawed is, therefore, a major theme of the play.
Following a series of environmental catastrophes and a worldwide pandemic which wiped out both animals and humans, society has moved into strict isolation – families live in sealed pods without contact with the outside world and are dependent upon crops which can be grown in the enclosed space. The health of diabetic Connie (Christine Mackie) has deteriorated to the extent she wishes to ‘opt out’ and applies for euthanasia. Granddaughter Nia (Ella Holt) has so little experience of life before isolation she raises no objection to the proposal. The application procedure is administered by bureaucrat Charles (Will Huntington) who begins an uneasy courtship of Nia. The social class divide between Nia and Charles is so extreme he is able to introduce her to previously unknown foodstuffs including a pineapple.
A convincing futuristic setting, hard to achieve in theatre, is facilitated by the attention paid to detail – Charles always wears protective gloves and urges sterilisation of surfaces. There are, however, plot points in A Pineapple which are murky. It seems odd, for example, that the authorities have banned entertainment, such as television, rather than use it as an opiate to help keep communities docile.
Christine Mackie delivers a superb performance as Connie making the character far more than just a representative of a bygone age. On stage even before the play begins Mackie’s body language, wincing at every movement and short of breath, perfectly suggests the weariness coming from physical deterioration and increasing desperation at growing mental confusion. The isolationism has crept into the characters and Connie seems unconcerned as to how Nia might cope in her absence.
Director Simon Naylor uses the first act to create the ominous sense of an ending – of one generation passing on even though the next one may be unprepared to take over. There is a surprising lack of anger: more a weary and baffled acceptance of the sequence of events. A hint Nia’s mother perished when the authorities brutally dispersed a protest march is not developed into full resentment. There is, however, little foreshadowing of plot developments in Act 2 making for a sharp change in tone.
Ella Holt’s Nia is so unworldly as to be close to an alien. She suffers existential dread, fearing she might be a figment of her grandmother’s imagination She does not have the lived experience to appreciate the likely emotional consequences of the proposed euthanasia to the extent she seems blasé about her grandmother’s possible demise. Nia is not so much naïve as uneducated, asking her lover if having sex means they can be described as ‘acquainted’. Without her grandmother’s guidance in Act 2, Nia becomes increasingly erratic, jumping into ill-informed decisions.
Will Huntington’s Charles is the least well developed character. Connie delivers a somewhat eccentric metaphor of men being like potatoes – spreading all over the place and taking over – and Charles becomes representative of both male privilege and social class consciousness. Asked to sing Nia a song the well-spoken Charles unconsciously demonstrates his privileged background – and that social inequality persists despite the crisis – by singing the Eton Boating Song.
Director Naylor delivers a tremendous coup de théâtre in Act 2 to show the harsh eviction of a character. But the shift in tone between the two acts, from reflective to fragmented social comment, is disorienting. After a leisurely first act the pace quickens in the second with shorter more abrupt scenes and a more confrontational relationship between the characters. The stark suggestion that after societal upheaval lessons will go unlearned, the social class system will be more rigid than ever, and the few remaining resources will be gobbled up by the elite rather than shared among communities is jarring after the gentle viewpoint of the first act. Possibly had Act 1 featured more hints- other than the school crest on Charles’s jacket – of potential developments in the second act the change in tone would be less noticeable.
A Pineapple is a thought-provoking play; the high quality of the acting more than compensates for the uneven structure.
Runs until 2 May 2025 and on tour
