Writer: Lucas Closs
Director: Lola Shaw
The first theatrical performance for over a decade in the attic of the historic music venue Stepney Green’s George Tavern, Spiel’s Skunlip, is a play about the intersection of art and biography with wit, humour, and an excellent live musical score.
When the location dictates the performance will take place ‘above’ the George Tavern, it really does mean it. Up many a flight, the audience traverses through draughty rooms with ceiling beams, exposed floorboards and peeling wallpaper (the Tavern’s day job is a film location, so it makes sense). It’s a perfectly articulated setting for Café Skunlip, where the renowned novelist KP has just arrived.
She is awaiting a prominent critic to interview her in the very town that inspired her best-selling novel. Instead, KP meets a young and unnerving, café manager (Zoe Aronson) and enthusiastic tour guide (Stephen Chance) who stir up a host of nostalgia and gossip about the townspeople she left behind in her book, and potentially, provide her with new inspiration.
Francesca Anderson is brilliantly unlikeable as KP. Detached and harmless, it becomes apparent her excellent way with words is helped enormously by the people in her past she weaves into her prose without remorse for the consequences. Aronson as the sweet and hilariously unsettling café manager is enthrallingly understated as she tells KP of the fate of the people of Skunlip after she left. Under Lola Shaw’s direction, the performers tease out a hugely engaging dynamic, aided by a distinctive live score from onstage musicians Denix Dortok and Mariia Liaskovetsl; all the parts working seamlessly to transport Lucas Closs’ witty dialogue from naturalism to moments of mysticism with ease.
The production’s selling point is the unique portrayal of the toxic relationship the people of Skunlip have with being disparagingly caricatured in KP’s novel, and the tourism, money and opportunity it brings to the town. Chance’s character, the enthusiastic and fraught tour guide James, particularly demonstrates these subtleties as he desperately tries to inspire KP into putting Skunlip ‘back on the map’ with another novel and reckoning with the personal consequences of the last one.
The production suffers a dip in energy toward the end; a seemingly imagined and unnecessary conversation between KP and an unnamed critic, an attempt to give KP a justification for her damaging words. But a perfectly pitched resolution, with just the right balance of magic and realism, is enough for the show to redeem itself.
An intimate space, the attic of the George Tavern not only provides a fitting setting but also offers an array of particular props (curated by the owner herself). It’s articulated, beautifully considerate and gives a sense of real history to the space and action on stage. A bit like the production itself; a compelling concept, coupled with a lively score, excellent dialogue and standout performances.
It’s now appropriate to say come to the George Tavern for the music and stay for the theatre.
Runs until 29 March 2024
