Kings Theatre Edinburgh – until 22 February 2020
Reviewed by Manetta McIntosh
4****
I did not know what to expect from this play as I hadn’t heard of it previously. I knew it had some well-known names attached, co-directed by Kathy Burke, so expected it would be a decent watch, but I did not expect to feel a range of emotions very early on. This is a play about people, how they connect and how they communicate or don’t communicate. But in a week where the news is dominated by #bekind, showing how we never really know what is going on with our closest friends and family, the issues in this play were particularly poignant.
The staging was simple but effective. A few large lightboxes that were moved by the actors on stage to create everything from a hospice to a garage reception to a nightclub. My favourite part of the staging was how they managed to show the busy working day of a nurse in a hospice by having people pass or take away simple props as she delivered her monologue. It has a small cast of 6, the play is delivered predominately as monologues with a hint of interaction, some of the characters’ lives overlap but that is not the main theme. The play shows us how we can appear to be composed and focused on the outside but is that really a side effect of demons that we are dealing with on the inside?
Every character has something going on that most of us can relate to, Chizzy Akudolu plays Josie who is trying to achieve educational greatness vicariously through her son Manny (Caleb Roberts). She feels that her father didn’t really care about her education and ‘if only he had pushed her, she could have….’ As a result, she has been more engaged in her sons’ education and perhaps pushed him into an environment that he would not have picked for himself. Chizzy has a way of making you laugh one minute and then have you on the brink of tears the next, it was an emotional rollercoaster, perfectly delivered.
Another stand out performance for me was given by Charlotte Bate, she played Ange who is a Hospice nurse. She has her own childhood demons she is dealing with which has resulted in a rift between her and her sister, Clare (Polly Frame). Clare works in HR, both jobs require skilled communication, yet they lack this skill when dealing with each other. On top of the issue they are dealing with Clare also thinks she was visited by a ghost when she was younger, this is why she doesn’t want to be on her own, the mystery is hilariously solved at the end of the play. Again, moving performances peppered with black humour.
Our other couple are Bex, (Simone Saunders) and Graham (Andrew Turner). Graham is a taxi driver, his wife Bex has cancer. This had me a little confused initially, the parts with Bex and Graham are forward and back through a short timeline. Because they are not in scenes together initially, I had not realised they were a couple. Grahams’ scenes were in the present whilst Bex’s were in the recent past and eventually they come together, or that’s how I perceived it. Graham is struggling with depression, as a taxi driver he tries to engage with his hires, but this does not relieve the feelings of loneliness as people do not always want to talk to him. A chance encounter with Josie could have ended differently for him if she had not reached out when she did. This is a stark reminder to us all that you never really know what the person next to you is dealing with, and how our actions could mean the difference between saving someone’s life in that moment or not. Bringing us right back to #bekind.