The Collector at Greenwich Theatre

An edited version of this review was first published on Everything Theatre. The Collector, which won a Scotsman Fringe First Award at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, was an arresting look at torture in the US-run prisons of war-torn Iraq in 2003-2004 from three different vantage points.

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The Collector opens with an encounter with a ghost. Kasprowicz (William Reay), a captain in the US military, is visibly shaken, and there’s a quiver in his comfortable Southern drawl. It’s not the presence of the ghost in the Iraqi military prison that unnerves him, it’s the absence that it stands for – the facelessness, the shadows in the dark. 

This spectral metaphor carries through the play, with three characters taking turns to tell the story of Nassir, a charming Iraqi interpreter who loves American music and has high hopes for a future Iraqi democracy after what he thinks will be a brief war. We know he’s wrong, of course, but his optimism is infectious – despite the fact that Nassir doesn’t have a physical presence on stage. He’s the ghost in the room, the present absence. Through the stories of his fiancee, Zoya (Anna Riding), his American colleague, Sergeant Foster (Olivia Beardsley), and his superior, Captain Kasprowicz, we get both the story of an individual with conflicted loyalties – as well as a war gone horribly wrong. Nassir may be the crucial interpreter for the American army, the pivot on which interrogations and negotiations rest, but because he isn’t present on stage, his actions and decisions must, in a sense, be interpreted by the rest. It’s a clever device, allowing us several varying but complementary points of view as the three performers piece together and translate his every move.

Dissecting the US war in Iraq is an ambitious undertaking, and playwright Henry Naylor chooses to focus on the intimate interactions between this tightly knit group of characters. We get equal insight into Nassir’s domestic life and his working life, how he must navigate his initially unquestioning loyalty to the Americans for a freedom hoped for, but also confront the eventual realisation that the American war machine and its facade of heroism is really not what it seems. Nassir is a cultural intermediary: a “compatriot” to his newfound American community but a blacklisted “collaborator” to the Iraqi insurgents; and the titular “collector” – of music, hopes and dreams – to his wife-to-be. Naylor juggles these three identities with a great deal of skill character-wise, but plot-wise he’s forced to turn to a few obvious devices to propel the story along, including a romantic tryst that feels forced and doesn’t give the emotional payoff that’s needed later on.

Actors Riding, Reay and Beardsley are a well-oiled ensemble and play off each other’s energy comfortably. Their characters speak as they would in a documentary piece, directly to the audience, and this act of confiding their hopes and fears gives the play a strong sense of intimacy. The spare set design, three incandescent light bulbs suspended over three stools, mirrors the austerity of a prison cell – or perhaps the figurative prison cell that Nassir finds himself in as his three identities become increasingly at odds with one another. In the cavernous Greenwich Theatre, however, the wider distance between the audience and the storytellers sacrifices some of the action's immediacy and edge as the actors struggle to evoke the confines of either a jail cell – or the initial refuge of a civilian home that quickly begins to feel like a prison.

As the 75-minute play speeds to a close, Naylor’s carefully crafted critique of America’s wartime atrocities changes tracks abruptly, losing its sting when it becomes a generic critique of the darkness of the human heart, and the depths to which it will descend in order to survive. There is truth in this Conradian “heart of darkness”, but I wonder if The Collector might have been more powerful still had Naylor pursued that thread right to the end. But the production remains a rare theatrical examination of torture during the war in Iraq that benefits from a documentarian’s eye and historical hindsight. This may be a play investigating torture, but it’s one that wisely chooses not to depict or glorify a single act of graphic torture on stage. The Collector is a haunting reminder of a recent past that many have been all too quick to forget.

Playwright: Henry Naylor
Director: Michael Cabot
Presented by: Kathryn Barker in association with London Classic Theatre
Box Office: 020 8858 7755
Booking Link: http://ticketing.greenwichtheatre.org.uk/single/PSDetail.aspx?psn=60689
Booking Until: 21 January 2017

Abigail at The Bunker

Pardon the long break. Here's my review of Abigail at The Bunker, first published on Everything Theatre.

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Who is Abigail, really? Her name is never spoken throughout this hour-long play, but it hangs in the air like a gift and a curse. Abigail pieces together the relationship between a 20-something young Woman (Tia Bannon) and a 40-something older Man (Mark Rose), both unnamed. There’s an echo of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) here, the similarly mononymous novel where a naive younger woman is quickly enchanted by an older man when they meet on holiday. But this is where the contemporary homage ends. This time, it’s the Man who’s enchanted by a nubile young thing, but whose romantic ideals will soon be dashed. And the ghost that haunts this play’s relationship isn’t a female paragon of perfection, but an Oedipal shadow from the Woman’s past.

Abigail feels like the darker, angstier foil to Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last Five Years, where a sense of optimism tends to linger even if we know the relationship doesn’t. As the timelines of the two lovers in the musical converge and then unspool, there’s still a latent cheerfulness as one half of the duo gazes, rosy-eyed, at all the love waiting for her in the future. There’s no such hopefulness in Abigail, where, to quote one of the characters, it’s ‘one or two months of nice stuff followed by ten months of shit’.

Playwright Fiona Doyle presents a fractured series of vignettes from different moments in the couple’s time together, leaping back and forth from the wake of a bitter argument, to a chance first encounter at an airport, to a vacation taken together abroad. There are some frank, refreshing discussions about relationships and some amusingly authentic moments of awkwardness, but these tend to get washed out as Woman evolves rapidly from the Pixie to the Manic of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and this transformation wipes out any sharp observations that might have been drawn about a couple struggling to make a relationship work (or deliberately sabotaging it). The temporality of this relationship is also evoked through the set, a veritable mountain of makeshift cardboard boxes, with symbols for fragile objects printed on the sides, and a suitcase in a corner. Throughout the course of the play, the set is increasingly littered with clothing, a beer bottle or two, and the detritus of emotional baggage strewn across the stage.

We aren’t sure who Abigail is, but Abigail doesn’t seem too sure about what it is, either. If it’s meant to be a close study of a relationship falling apart at the seams, the shifting timeline of the storytelling means that there are a lot of large gaps – some of which work in giving the play a sense of intrigue and unpredictability; others mean that we are left with a lot of gaping holes as to the characters’ motivations and intentions. Bannon and Rose do their best with what they’re given, with Rose turning in a sturdy, believable performance as a man first entranced, then quickly disillusioned as what once was a spark of magic turns into the ashes of frustration and denial. Or is Abigail meant to be a study of one woman’s dark streak that poisons a promising relationship? There are strange, unresolved hints of a larger mystery at play here that may very well be red herrings, thrown out as quickly as the play ends. The couple’s age gap is hinted at, but never interrogated, in what I felt was a lost opportunity.

The weather cooperated marvellously the night I watched this play in The Bunker’s subterranean space – a night where miserable sleet pelted London and dark, glittering ice covered the streets. In one scene, the couple sits at a lookout point on a mountain and are disappointed by the thick fog covering what was supposed to be a sumptuous, ‘bucket-list’ view. They then pick up a spray of buttercups, where the Man points out that the beautiful buds are poisonous. In Abigail, like Rebecca, one thing is for certain: what is beautiful might just kill you – or, worse still, disappoint you.

Playwright: Fiona Doyle
Director: Joshua McTaggart
Producers: Zoe Robinson and Joel Fisher
Designer: Max Dorey
Sound Designer: Andy Josephs
Lighting Designer: Christopher Nairne
Box Office: 0207 234 0486
Booking Link: https://www.bunkertheatre.com/whats-on/abigail
Booking Until: 4 February 2017

A quick update

A very quick round-up of what I've been up to:

• Here in London, I'm writing for Everything Theatre and Exeunt Magazine as a contributing reviewer. So far I've reviewed A Wonderful Town at Ye Olde Rose & Crown Theatre Pub, and Tomorrow I Was Always A Lion by the Belarus Free Theatre. I'll be reviewing about 2-4 shows a month.
• Come for the Battersea Arts Centre's upcoming production, London Stories: Made By Migrants (Nov 4-26). I'm a volunteer and you might be in one of the small groups I'll be bringing around their lovely space.
• Back home in Singapore, my translation of Wu I-Wei's short story The Mountain Road is part of BooksActually's Gold Standard 2016, an anthology of short fiction previously unpublished in English edited by the wonderful Julie Koh. You can go for the launch on Nov 13 at the Singapore Writers Festival.

If you're in London and would like to meet up, do drop me a line.