Writer: Nell Rayner
Director: Jodie Braddick
Four lonely strangers and a myriad of forgettable chance encounters – some kind, some aggressive – are the focus of Nell Rayner’s 60-minute play Strangers playing at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre. It is built around a collection of monologues outlining the alienated state of the very different protagonists, all of whom moved to the unnamed city for, or to escape, something, and the challenges they face in the unremitting urban landscape. Strangers is about a craving for connection, the faded allure of metropolitan living and the ordinary people who fall through the cracks.
Rayner’s play feels like it might be a happy drama at first, a series of unexpected meet-cutes from which new friendships and relationships might grow. But the reality for these characters is that the city is a hard place to live in and the anonymity they feel also becomes something they crave, pushing away strangers and opportunities to be known rather than embracing them, the way we all do every day.
Much of the focus of Strangers is on the dissatisfaction with work and how a time-filler ultimately consumes the characters’ lives. From the senior HR manager who drinks alone every night and works on Sundays rather than go home, to the taxi driver trying to overcome a broken heart, the strangers use work to structure their lives, but with little fulfilment or aspiration to change. Staged across the course of a year, they meet in coffee shops and pubs, train stations and in the street but Rayner keeps them lost, insular and divided.
It means the play does feel a little disparate and lacking in direction, a series of scenarios that as the story unfolds becomes a little repetitious as each character repeats patterns of behaviour which may be the point but isn’t dramatically satisfying. Nor is the audience able to truly dive beneath the surface of the four central creations and, while some surface information is provided about their background or activities, why and how they have ended up in this place is never fully addressed, which, in a character-driven piece, is a missed opportunity to understand why city living creates such deep disconnection.
Performed by Jennah Finnegan, Eve Wilson, Meghan Mabli and Maria-Vittoria Albertini Petroni each nameless creation is distinctive and finds different layers of pathos in their separate monologues outlining the sense of separation from everyone else’s reality. The combination of duologue meet-ups works well, and the actors find individuality in their character’s pain but also convey its collective impact.
Rayner’s writing is stark and poetic and when ‘the sun rises like sour milk’ at the start of the play and later ‘the sky vomits,’ there is a vividness to the language that conjures up the terrible beauty of the urban landscape. Occasionally the opportunity to savour these complex descriptions is lost in the churn between the actors, easier to read than to say, but with some stronger characterisation Strangers can certainly bring the audience together.
Runs until 1 July 2023
