Writer: Ava Wong Davies
Director: Anna Himali Howard with Izzy Rabey
Ava Wong Davies’ finely detailed play about a souring relationship is badly served by its traverse staging. Actor Sabrina Wu is commanding as the British Chinese woman who falls in love with a poet, but too often the audience only sees her back.
Not only does Wu have the challenge of playing to two sides, she also has to wander around an ugly set that is inches deep in mud. A cheap bed with a cheap-looking duvet forms an island in the middle of the dirt. Mydd Pharo’s design would be perfect for a Sarah Kane play. Even though Wong Davies’ play begins joyfully as Nina and Gabriel meet for the first time, the set informs us too blatantly that there will be no happy ending.
But this initial meeting is described expertly and Wu ensures that Wong Davies’ lyrical words seem natural and chatty, even if the sentences are full of minutiae. The pair meets at a barbeque in Tooting. People have ketchup on their faces; there are intricate tiles on the floor. All these details never overburden the story; instead they give it clarity. We see how anxious Nina is at the party and, then, how excited she is to be introduced to the man who her friends have seen her checking out.
He’s from money. Her parents run a Chinese restaurant. Nina provides a quick summary of her childhood, but despite its brevity it, too, is full of lovely observations. It’s easy to see her chewing on the ribs that the chefs save for her and, when she’s older, to see her smoking cigarettes under an orange light outside the restaurant.
This attention to detail never fades even when the relationship begins to go wrong. He makes fun of her friends; gives her money to get her phone fixed when the screen cracks and yet digs out months-old receipts to show her that she still owes him money for the coffees he bought. His control can only get worse.
At key points in the narrative, the design seeks to underscore the dramatic scenes that Wu is relating. At one point distracting steam pours out of the mattress while, at another, rain pours down on one side of the stage. But these gimmicks only undermine the action; they make the story unnecessarily melodramatic, despite the Anne Carson quote that Davies puts in the play text ‘ It pains me to record this/but I am not a melodramatic person.’ This play would be so much more effective played on an empty stage with the audience seated on just one side.
The play doesn’t quite know where to end, and Graceland’s 75-minutes is probably ten minutes too long. It’s clear that Wong Davies wants to show the aftermath of the romance and to show that there are no easy ways to recover from a toxic relationship, but the days drag a little and when the end comes, it appears out of nowhere, and is a little too neat. It’s an ending of sorts but perhaps this play doesn’t need one.
Wu is incredible here, and Ava Wong Davies’ script is subtle and nuanced. But the design and the direction work against them.
Runs until 11 March 2023
