Writer and Director: Roxy Cook
In modern Russia, capitalism has displaced communism as the means for the powerful to exploit the lower classes. Nowhere is that more in evidence with Roxy Cook’s blackly comic A Woman Walks Into a Bank, which examines the consequences when an old woman is given a loan she neither needs nor affords, and whose infirmity causes her to promptly forget she even took it out.
The cast of three narrates the story together, each actor taking the previous line and either embellishing it or changing it, as if they are constructing a fairytale on the hoof. It’s all meticulously planned out, of course, and the repetition, the reminders of what has only just happened as if it is new information, ties in the old woman’s deteriorating memory.
Giulia Innocenti is much younger than the old woman she portrays, but everything from her posture to her slow, slightly slurred speech patterns exudes the character of a woman who’s lived through decades of turbulent Moscow life. She is matched by Sam Newton as the boisterous, boyish bank manager who is delighted to have sold his first loan – a lucrative and legal bit of usury, as the penalties for late payment include rates of 2% a day.
The first act delves into the back stories of each of these characters and a third, Keith Dunphy’s debt collector. While we are aware of the connections between the three strands of story, as both writer and director Cook keeps them largely separate for most of Act I. All three actors also take on the role of the old woman’s cat, Sally. Initially more for a bit of comic relief and aloof observance of humans’ silliness, the feline becomes a key driver in bringing all three characters together in the second act.
And it is in Act II that the seeds planted in the first half of Cook’s play begin to flower. As Dunphy’s collector – as sympathetic as his business is inhumane – begins to encroach upon the old woman’s life, there is a tension in the air as, even in David Allen’s carpet-lined box of a set, we can envisage characters just missing each other as one takes the lift and the other the stair; we hold our breath as the old woman’s penchant for obsessively locking the doors and windows of her tiny apartment increases the risk when all three characters have converged in one space.
Although the set could be more robust, with hidden nooks and alcoves sometimes making their presence known too early, the oddball quality of its decoration fits nicely with Cook’s slightly askew way of looking at the world. With all the dialogue repetition, the story takes up a little over two hours when a literal telling would probably only need half that. But the time flies because the hilarious, moving script is written and performed with such a brilliant sense of propulsion.
Cook shows us a Russia that is so paralysed by a sense of its own exceptionalism that it is unaware that it is circling the drain. It sometimes feels as if that’s something that could be applied to many other countries, including our own. But there’s something unique, and special, about the world A Woman Walks Into a Bank creates for us. It’s a world one feels privileged to have visited.
Continues until 9 December 2023
