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Review: 100

★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

Some plays are written strange, some achieve strangeness, and some have strangeness thrust upon them. 100, running this week at the BT, is all three of the above. I’m all for unusual and intriguing beginnings, but ten minutes in to this hour-long play and we’re all rather lost in a void of white cloths, black costumes and a solitary orange.

I got there in the end: four characters stuck in a post-death “void” where they must choose a memory to enable them to move on to a less hellish eternity before the countdown from 100 runs out. What this translates into is four people scrabbling frantically around in their increasingly empty-seeming lives to find something profound enough to send them on to the next world.

Each character acts chosen memories of varying success – Amy Davy’s character Sophie stands out as particularly engaging and, with the help of strong sound and lighting, successfully conveyed the claustrophobia of significant memories.  The climactic moment of her mental state, depicting a London filled with stuttering, decrepit insomniacs signalling her rapidly decaying mind, had me truly gripped. But we are left with too many gaps in between; characters and audience alike wonder why their chosen memory didn’t ‘work’, and why they, and we, are stuck among the proudly symbolic white sheets and philosophical questions.

Maybe that doesn’t matter – when the pace slowed down there was always the fantastically integrated piano music of DPhil music student Jennifer Lai to enjoy. And in visual terms it was fun to watch the enigmatic ‘Guide’ played by Lauren Jivani shimmy around in a tailcoat and watch-chain to rival any Dickensian villain or Wildean dandy.

Whilst the poker-faced villain played well against the hopeless naivety of the young couple and the emotional intensity of the city office worker, the vaguely exotic ‘tribal’ figure never quite came off. As the fourth in the group of memory-probing characters, his mental angst revolved around his ‘people’ refusing to embrace his revelation that “the earth is round, like an orange”. Over the course of the evening the laboured repetition of this point became inadvertently comic – although it did at least explain away the ever-present citrus fruit.

To be fair to the cast I think this particular script is a challenging one, and what they do with it is fleetingly poignant, witty and engaging. According to one character in the play, “it’s not what you know but what you do with it” that matters. Perhaps it’s not which production a company put on, but what they do with it that should provoke our judgement. 

100 is playing at the BT till Saturday 23rd

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