Safe House

You never know what you come across the Camden Fringe: I had stumbled upon the story of an alcoholic. The subject is controversial and at 3PM it rips you out of sunny London and throws you in the land of broken promises and empty bottles.

The cast of tree take you where you don’t necessarily want to go and leave you with a theatrical hangover. The play is funny, although I have cringed more times than laughed. While there are pearls of the text that echo in my ear, such as I found shade in our treeless garden“ – that might just be a metaphor for the central relationship, between Mr Alcoholic and wife - there were certainly several missed opportunities both in terms of humor and dramatic tension. 

Ok, I shall get critical: there is a story worth telling there and while I envied the witt and quality of theatrical language, the overall plot and the structure of the play I found somewhat patchy. In short we see Mr Alcoholic in a safe house reliving fragments of his life: falling in love, drinking, being married, drinking, memories of unhappy childhood, drinking, drinking, drinking, drinking. Past and present fuse in his dulled mind in a nest of empty beer cans, yet the story never raises above an insignificant and steady downfall. The present is more like a frame for the ad-hock flashbacks of the past, than a parallel time line. And the staging is clumsy: a bed  dominates the stage and together with all the cans and bottles restricts the performers on the tiny stage.

There are a bunch balloons hanging from the ceiling, a nice idea to represent a chandelier that is a motif in the play. As we progress the balloons are popping,  but the meaning of that is unclear: it seems as if they are used to mark the end of some scenes, but certainly not all, the popping is dramaturgically random, and the job is unfinished as they don’t all burst – meaning and opportunity to express is lost.

There are practical questions as well, such as why get changed on stage left couple of times in front of the audience, when there is a changing room to stage right. Why hang „headstone“ on the wall from the start? Why not clutter the stage gradually as the story unfolds? Why have all actors on stage all the time facing the back wall? Why only raise the debate about supporting alcoholics on tax-payers money in the last five minutes. The whole performance could be tighter, tidier and more engaging. The potential is definitely there.