The Green Room - Drama Barn

The problem with reviewing any Open Drama Night production is that there are obvious limitations. This is a one-night performance; they have to have a simple get-in and get-out in order to make things easier for the full-length play to come later that week. This makes it quite hard to comment on set or lighting as, under different circumstances, there’s no knowing how much more advanced they would have been.

As it was, the set was stark – two wooden chairs on one side of the stage, two armchairs on the other, and balanced by a desk and a chair in the middle. The desk overflowed with bottles of alcohol, cigarettes, reference books and crumpled-up bits of paper – the visual cliché of a struggling writer. The chairs, set in a semi-circle pattern, provided a natural stage area in the middle. Unfortunately, this generated some rather inactive staging, but, as I have said, there are limitations with an ODN.

As the audience walked in, the cast were acting already onstage. This nicely set the mood for the thematic content of the play – are we, as the audience, inside the writer’s head as well? What is fiction and what is reality? James Quelch gave a very believable performance as the creatively frustrated author, although sometimes his amusing facial expressions lent themselves a bit more to comedic acting. There were certain lines in the script that I think could have been utilised a bit more to get a laugh from the audience, but the actors whipped through their lines so that any witty lines were lost. Quelch provided some small light relief from the heavier, more ponderous themes of the play.

Heather Adlington, although diminutive, packed a powerful punch with her character. I thought she performed very professionally, and reacted constantly to her fellow cast-members. There could have been more of a distinction between the author’s script and the characters’ own independent conversations. It seemed that the director could have produced some very funny theatre if the actors had really got to grips with the hammy, melodramatic script that the author produced, and then contrasted it with their own sarcastic conversations.

Emily Farrow’s portrayed naivety and unwitting insight had a friend in fits of laughter next to me. It is worrying that Farrow may become typecast as the ditzy, girly blonde when she is in fact a very accomplished actress, most clearly demonstrated when she made the transition from dumb blonde to a different character. Even though she was only able to break out of her girlishness for a few lines, the audience could really see her inhabit her new character in a way that the other actors didn’t when they had to play a new character in a scene.

The script was well written, with some lovely imagery (there’s the English student in me coming out), but basically trod the same themes for half an hour. An interesting initial idea, however, I would have liked to see more action and less dialogue. Qaisar Siddiqui coped with his large amount of lines particularly well, although at times he seemed to be over-anticipating his cues, so that his character wouldn’t logically have had time to digest what was said. This is a small criticism, however, and he gave an energy and direction to what was otherwise quite a static play.

Stuart Hall’s character is described as “just a suit”. Consequentially, his character did not have much depth, but at least Hall looks dashing in a suit. Unfortunately, the ending was somewhat anti-climactic and a little confusing, but then perhaps that was the point. The characters can never escape from inside the author’s head, because they are a figment of his imagination. Stuart Hall delivered the final line perfectly: “So much for clarity of mind”. What a fitting conclusion to a challenging and thought-provoking play.

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