Writer: Lydia Brickland
Director: Chloe Cattin
Mid-June in the middle of our first heatwave of summer may not seem the ideal time for a Christmas one-woman show. But while Deck the Stalls is set at Yuletide, its themes of grief and loss resonate at any time of year.
Laura Rea plays forthright Geordie Serena, who left the Byker district of Newcastle to read English at university. After joining a graduate trainee programme to avoid returning home, she is now an office worker in Milton Keynes and is having to deal with all kinds of chaos at the work Christmas party.
Rea’s Serena strikes up an engaging rapport with the audience, allowing us to see the rest of the office through her eyes: the boss with the cringe-worthy speech kicking off proceedings, the HR manager who’s organised the whole party, the man who’s bought himself a pair of decks and fancies himself as a superstar DJ.
Rea’s knack for accents is a large contributor to making Serena and all the office’s other characters distinct, although that’s also helped by the broad strokes with which Lydia Brickland’s script paints them. And so the HR manager, normally uptight and rules-based, becomes a raucous party animal in seconds, the DJ is a sleazy sex pest, and the intern is a hippy, hummus-eating, Guardian-reading lesbian.
The writing prevents the comedy of the office Christmas party from ever going anywhere that hasn’t been explored countless times before. What is more interesting is the gradual exploration of Serena’s complicated relationship with her late father as she prepares to spend her first festive season without him.
Rea gives Serena the semblance of a hard shell developed to prevent all her inner pain from tumbling out. Hints suggest that some of her pastimes – most notably reading, and especially The Lord of the Rings – have been put aside due to the memories they invoke. Less obvious is the question of whether her grief has pushed Serena into more reckless behaviour, especially an affair with a coworker (who, because the office is populated with predictable cliché, is married with two children).
Naturally, everything comes to a head as the party implodes into an alcohol-fuelled mess. And although everything proceeds with the same mix of good humour and predictability, the strength of Serena’s character – and Rea’s characterisation – means that one remains invested in whether she will be able to process and come to terms with her grief.
Brickland peppers in some nice observational moments within her script, from the concerned face people pull around colleagues whose loved ones have just died to how a toilet cubicle can become a place of sanctuary when you just can’t face the office.
It is a shame, though, that the party shenanigans crowd out some of the more reflective moments. For it’s in Serena’s more vulnerable moments that we begin to get hints of something, anything, that we haven’t seen before.
Reviewed on 16 June 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
Christmas cliché
