Writer: Richard Yuill
Director: Natcha Chirapiwat
Who would you choose to spend your last night on earth with – family, friends or maybe a failed relationship that has never made sense to you? For Eleanor and Arthur, the end of the world presents the perfect opportunity to revisit who they used to be, to think about the good times and the bad, and finally to understand what went wrong between them. Richard Yuill’s 60-minute play With a Bang performed at the Etcetera Theatre as part of the Camden Fringe Festival suggests there may have been one great love in everyone’s life, but you never know that until it is too late.
Yuill has created an interesting way into what becomes a conventional romantic comedy, directly addressing the audience as the characters introduce scenes from their life, providing a running commentary on what they believe were the core moments in their relationship before recreating them. Much of the humour comes from this blurring of memory and re-enactment as they step in and out of the past, all the while becoming increasingly confused about the present.
That is particularly strong later in the show when Eleanor’s reluctance to reimagine the last days of their connection, actively choosing to skip a direct recreation and provide the viewer – who the characters address directly – with a summary of the bad behaviours that triggered the final climactic conversations. It adds layers to the writing of With a Bang that not every encounter is dramatised in exactly the same way and that the contrast between the emotions and reasoning put forward at the time are questioned in the present as deeper explanations and subsequent reflections have contextualised their time together leading to recrimination and nostalgia, but also guilt.
There is more to explore here, and as the story plays out it becomes increasingly clear that the audience has learnt very little about either Eleanor or Arthur as individuals so investing in one of the many possible outcomes does become harder to sustain. Although we learn their jobs, any real sense of them as individuals with broader lives, tastes, interests, successes and failures gets lost in the lens of their relationship. One way to address that would be to consider how the former lovers might suggest the reflections of others on their relationship and its ending through reported speech, and despite a pointed reference to Arthur’s mother and Eleanor’s father, we never learn more about the people they know which ultimately undermines the reality of their life together.
Yuill’s Arthur is more mysterious than Isobel Hamilton’s Eleanor who absorbs much of the blame for the end of their affair and it would give greater depth to the characters to understand why that is and what drove both of them. It might also enhance the victim-perpetrator dynamic that With a Bang currently maintains leading to a guessable final scene. But Yuill’s play shows a lot of promise with its interesting approach to raking over the coals of a failed relationship and how the one may have been there all along.
Reviewed on 4 August 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
