Writer: Marco Biasioli
Director: Liam Grogan
A Theatre Show, as advertised online, sells itself as a “thought-provoking work [which] explores the challenges contemporary artists face in the production of their art”. What it delivers however is a piece not ridiculous or funny enough to inhabit the comedy space it imagines it occupies nor emotionally captivating enough to live up to its self-appointed “thought-provoking” claim.
This piece of theatre is about the love of theatre and theatrical, extreme lengths some will go to for their art – namely robbing your own place of work to fund a production called, you guessed it, A Theatre Show. While this show aims to jump into this metatextual zeitgeist of plays about how hard it is to do plays – such as A Strange Loop and Tick Tick…Boom – it doesn’t carry any of the emotional weight or writing that would have us understand this struggle and get on side with our down-and-out struggling characters.
The 50(ish) minute production suffers from too many blackout set changes for the restrictive run time, too many scenes and irrelevant characters, and importantly too little time spent getting to know, and crucially, warm to any of our four central characters. This results in a piece lacking in any flow or depth.
One of our more interesting characters is a single mother who has lost custody of her child and who sees this imagined production and her big theatre dreams as a way of getting the kid back. This narrative branch revealed early on offers some hope of a complex personal journey, a mother motivated by desperation to commit a crime. Instead, what we get is a badly acted drunk scene near the show’s climax which is interrupted by another more pressing plot point barging its way in the door.
This interruption of a moment of genuine interest in favour of moving the story along is maybe the crux of what goes wrong for Theatre Show. We don’t get to know any of the characters, their relationships with one another or their backstories at all. Nor do we get any dialogue or performances that have us warm to them, so when their crimes ultimately catch up with them and their plans start to destructively unravel we don’t really care.
If instead, the intention is in fact not to provoke thought as billed but instead to simply make us laugh with this ill-fated heist then what the performance, or rather the writing, lacks is jokes… or heists for that matter. The cast makes some attempt at bringing us dialogue in a way that it perhaps feels is comical but sadly the performance suffers from the classic pitfall of a script which peppers itself with swear words in the hope it passes as comedy.
Reviewed on 27 August 2023
