by Frankie Parham
It should be harder to go wrong if you start with something simple. Director Steve Loman has attempted to build The One That Got Away on this basis, as it begins simply with a park bench on a cleanly lit stage and continues with a single character entering and sitting on it throughout the performance. Henry (Sky Singh, who admirably shoulders the weight of the show) barely shifts from his sitting position, even though he is keenly searching for his hat and is all the while bombarded with one bizarre encounter after another. Barely halfway through, he has already faced a snobbishly smitten couple, a putrid pensioner and a rigidly mannered businessman.
All these roles, and many more, are performed by an able cast. Mark Cartwright dons the businessman caricature, before becoming a nagging mother clutching her Primark shopping. Beth William proves all her upper class worth in a similar fashion to Ben Galpin, who tirelessly plays most of the other characters, having to cover just about every accent on the cheap gag spectrum. Roisin Watson also makes regular varied appearances, both as an excitable girl and Henry’s wife of old, Elaine. With such an energetic cast, it seems a shame that, more often than not, the characters they play are incessantly upper class. The cringing drill of prolonged Received Pronunciation is only broken by further cliché: a postman from up north (he’s called Pat by the way), a German spy or another posh guy, but this time with a farcical speech impediment, identical to that of Pontius Pilate in Life of Brian.
Much of the play’s structure is indebted to the all too familiar pattern found in Monty Python and Blackadder: the straight character, on the same (apparently sane) level as the omniscient audience, is pestered by several daft and ignorant idiots. Neither the acting, nor much of the material is at fault (although some of the dialogue could have been clipped), but the play’s reliance on this hackneyed theme is its downfall. Annoyingly, there are moments where the credibility didn’t have to be lost in monotony and could have been saved. Henry ironically talks of the irritation of losing something: “you don’t realise the pain and regret until the object is gone”. “You get niggled from feeling regretful” and “it all boils…” he continues, but just short of turning over a new intriguing leaf, he finishes, saying: “it all boils to the same thing”. Likewise, the writer Cathy Thomas construes a satisfying twist for the conclusion, but it is predictable and only leaves the audience feeling more confused. The One That Got Away is certainly befitting of its title: there’s a nice ring to it, but the sense – anyone?
The One That Got Away runs through November 3rd at the BT in the late slot (9:30pm).
