Writer: Riley Elton McCarthy
Director: Georgie Rankcom
Playwright Riley Elton McCarthy, along with fellow actors Matthías Hardarson and Daniel Neil Ash, clearly have a ball with this densely packed horror story. No cliché of the genre is unexplored. We’re in a decaying old family house where Grandma is dying, unseen, in a bedroom. Lights flicker or fail, plunging everything into darkness. There’s an evocative soundscape of eerie noises. There is much talk of haunting, and all three main characters are evidently haunted by all sorts of things which will eventually be brought to light. Early on, there are crucifixes, burnings, spooky dolls and a jar of teeth (presumably the eponymous ivories). Later, there will be sleepwalking, a séance, menacing dogs, buried bones and much, much more.
Then there’s the obvious tension between the three characters. Bisexual botanist Gwyn and non-binary Sloane have opted for heteronormative marriage. Sloane is a young playwright, already noted for successfully mining personal trauma for dramatic purposes. In an early scene with husband Gwyn, Sloane snatches scraps of raw dialogue between them, scribbling them down for future use. It’s all really meta. What do you think of my soliloquy? Sloane repeatedly asks, having delivered something brutally honest to Gwyn. There is talk of Gwyn’s medication, but it’s Sloane’s out-of-control energy that seems dangerously manic.
Their friend Beckham turns up, apparently to help them market the house the moment grandma departs. He opts for comedy camp, self-consciously vlogging his faux-enthusiasm over the place’s gothic potential. He’s rather posh English, but quite how he became involved with the lives of these Americans isn’t clear. His accent gradually loses its RP overtones – possibly a deliberate move in the same way that the portrait on the wall of grandma gradually becomes more youthful. So we’ve got shades of Dorian Gray, The Woman in Black, with lots of mentions of Tennessee Williams and Chekhov. Edgar Allen Poe is suggested with the constant references to the basement which you must never venture into.
More important than this whirlwind of self-conscious allusion, however, is the relationship of the three. Reasons are found for each of the characters to be absent (writing upstairs, planting bulbs, out buying tea) so that pairs can get down to the real business of the play. It’s no real surprise to find that there is still something between Gwyn and Beckham, although it takes a whole lot of hokum for them to declare their true feelings to one another.
For someone who mines their personal trauma for their art, Sloane has neglected to tell anyone about the spectacularly gruesome death of their younger sister. This has to wait for Act 3 when there’ll be the further treat of zombified bodies in the basement.
The play’s manic energy has diminishing returns. All those dramatic lighting effects designed by Skylar Turnbull-Hurd and Adam Lenson’s chilling sounds lose their effectiveness when used constantly over the play’s 90-minute run. The audience, at this performance at least, seems unmoved either by comic moments or by what should have been jump scares.
Runs until 26 July 2025
1 Comment
Fair review. I thought the central set up of the triangle between a gay man, a bisexual man and a non-binary woman was full of interest and potential, and indeed drove all the best scenes and exchanges. I could easily have done without the horror elements. “A Bisexual Made For Two” might have been a better title.