Writer and Director: Alex Viveash
Mack drinks a lot. We know that before he even walks on stage. His flat is a confusion of Red Stripe cans with the odd bottle of whiskey sticking out. He will clear the mess up one day, he remarks, but it’s telling that the pile remains for the show’s whole 60 minutes. The evocatively entitled In Our Broken Hours is a well-acted, yet familiar story about the dangers of alcohol.
Probably set around 10 years ago, Mack is 59 and appears to be a functioning alcoholic. He’s lucid and affably conversational as he speaks directly to the audience. He’s in a bit of a mess, however. Final payment demands keep coming through his letterbox. His council flat is rat-infested. It’s all very grim, much like the faded Status Quo T-shirt he wears.
His daughter Emma gives him money to pay off the bills while knowing that he spends it on booze instead. Although some might see her as an enabler, she does the best she can, responding politely to his thrice-daily phone calls. She never refuses his requests for cash. Strangely, she paints a very different picture to the one Mack gives us. She says that he’s often so drunk that he forgets her name and that her mother remembers the trouble he caused when he was on the lash. But the Mack we see, even when he’s been knocking back the beers all night, doesn’t come across as violent or absentminded at all.
Little actually happens in In Our Broken Hours: a series of phone calls, some monologues and a single scene when they are together and when she buys him more whiskey. The end is inevitable. Thankfully, the acting keeps the hour going. Simon Ashton is relaxed as Mack, who believes he has his drinking and smoking under control. Giulia Rose’s Emma is naturally portrayed too; having not grown up with her father, there is a distance between them that she bridges with decency. Alex Viveash directs his own play and eschews any flashiness or narrative tricks, focusing instead on stillness.
The time setting is an odd choice. Why Viveash has chosen to place this story a decade or so in the past is unclear. Unless, of course, it’s meant to be set in the present day (Mack mentions Disney+ and his daughter appears to have a new iPhone), but no 59-year-old would be banging on about Status Quo today and neither would he have left school in 1981. Mack seems part of an older generation that gender politics haven’t entirely reached. A more obvious reference to the period in which In Our Broken Hours takes place would be useful, but an air of elegy settles on the piece nevertheless.
Runs until 30 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
