Two stars
David Mamet’s Squirrels follows the story of Arthur (Charles Reston), an arrogant writer who is adamant that his latest work must open with an incident involving a squirrel, but who cannot settle on a suitable scene. His protégé Edmund (Archie Davies) tries vainly to help, whilst also enduring his educator’s pretentious literary babble about such abstractions as ‘form’ and ‘concept’. Eleanor Rushton completes the cast as the cleaning woman, whose purpose primarily consists of ridicule and flirting.
Where the action may seem lacking, the clever humour of Mamet’s dialogue shines through, and this production, directed by Alev Scott, focuses on the play’s comic potential.
Reston brings a lot of energy to the stage as the suitably annoying Arthur, and perfectly captures his excessive excitement and exasperation over various hypothetical squirrel episodes. The quick-fire dialogue between him and Edmund, played for laughs, is particularly well-timed so that Arthur’s patronising tone manages to be amusing rather than just irritating. The cleaning woman’s own wild literary efforts are humorous in their eccentricity, but much of her comic innuendo – and there is plenty of it – falls flat.
As the play progresses, the inevitable power shift between Arthur and Edmund generates scenes of more emotional content, and the tragedy of Arthur’s realisation that he is losing his creative touch is not quite captured in this production. Although erratic and angry, we never see the writer’s insecurity and despair as he resorts to turning to the cleaning lady for comfort, and so he remains nothing more than a parody of the egotistical intellectual.
The play is enjoyable as light-hearted entertainment, and Scott makes good use of the space to keep the audience engaged without distracting from the actors’ skilful characterisations. Nevertheless, the banality of the plot is eventually frustrating, and cannot ultimately be held together with one-liners and comic asides, however amusing these may be in isolation.
