Writer and Director: Tommaso Giacomin
TG Works use Alec Baldwin’s shooting of Halyna Hutchins as a means to explore the complexity of male rage, its permanent underlying existence in everyday scenarios and the sudden explosion of violence that leads to guilt and growing anxiety. The Uncontainable Nausea of Alec Baldwin, performed at the New Diorama Theatre, places a character with the same name as the famous actor in the uncomfortable position of having to reconcile and explain what he has done, using European absurdist and surrealist theatre techniques to consider how men deal with rage and its consequences.
Written by Tommaso Giacomin, the play begins with the titular Alec (James Aldred) in conversation with what might be an AI chatbot, a therapy session of sorts that pushes him to admit and explain what he has done, something he cannot do. This process of evasion dominates the first part of the show, but may not be deliberate, claiming he can’t remember or isn’t sure of events, only a feeling of nausea when pushed too far by the entity onscreen. Giacomin considers definitions of purpose, culpability and responsibility throughout, asking, ” Are we guilty, only when intention is there?”
In doing this Giacomin devises a number of scenarios to push Alec to consider himself and the world around him and although not always successful or obviously purposeful, the cyclical nature of these adds to the growing pressure on the character to find some kind of explanation for himself and his conduct. The middle part of the show is probably the least considered as a series of ideas cut across one another, including props such as a rather sinister giant, inflatable chair, a huge smiley head made like a piñata that is bashed by a spiralling Alec and a montage of videos from YouTube on how to apologise in different situations. All of this is mixed with lots of obsessive cleaning, some Henry Hoover humour and a meta-acknowledgement that Alec is not the Alec Baldwin.
But as Giacomin’s show evolves, the ideas become stronger, and the situation that caused Alec’s rage is played out in various ways. In every case, there is a domestic or ordinary scene with friends and strangers that gets out of hand, revealing a disproportionate anger that courses through the character, even in the most mundane situations like buying a sandwich or watching football in the pub. Giacomin’s treatment of this increasingly distorts Alec’s memory of the event, played first as a heavily melodramatic version of the night and then as a scene from sitcom Friends before landing on the truth of what happened.
There is a lot here that remains undernourished, including male aggression towards women in the story, the visibility and scrutiny of being filmed in acts of rage and the weaponry of expressive violence, including a baseball bat and gun that feature briefly, and at 90-minutes The Uncontainable Nausea of Alec Baldwin starts to feel a little long, particularly in its overwritten final monologues. Yet Giacomin’s approach feels genuinely refreshing in a landscape that rarely tackles this style of theatremaking, and there is plenty of political purpose to take TG Works forward.
Runs until 24 March 2026
