Do not sit on a park bench alone. Ever. Edward Albee’s Zoo Story is testament to that old adage, and Will Tyrell’s production is testament to the power of the piece. A poignant study of human beings at both their most frightening and their most vulnerable, Zoo Story is a provocative, engaging piece of theatre, whose concern of alienation in modern society ought to cut painfully close to the bone for our own facebook generation.
A sparse two-hander, the play unfolds on a New York park bench (genuinely imported from Pembroke College); the audience witnesses a conversation between Peter and Jeremy, and experience the wild vacillations between the pathetic fragility and unsettling derangement of the latter. The train of Jeremy’s thought which propels the piece gathers pace at breakneck speed, veering dangerously from dark humour to deeply emotive reflections on the dehumanising aspect of loneliness.
Antti Laine tackles the formidable challenge of playing so complex a character with aplomb; his marvellous performance never over-eggs the pudding, that fan-assisted danger in approaching theatrical schizophrenia, but captures the inwardness of Jeremy’s very outwardly manifest psychological problems with disconcerting clarity. Rob Nixon matches Laine’s captivating engagement with his character’s warped humanity, serving as a wide-eyed, vulnerable and deeply sympathetic foil radiating the warmth of the well-meaning everyman so at variance with his sinister company.
The dialogue plays with zingy, frantic conversation and awkward silence, that constant companion of awkward encounters on a park bench. By the end of this piece, however, the audience will be left longing for an old-fashioned, honest awkward moment’s good intentions, left instead with the consolation of an unforgiving and shocking climax. Zoo Story is interested in extremes; the juxtaposition between Peter and Jeremy reaches out to comment on class division; the isolated, vulnerable individual versus uncaring society; and the powerlessness of the watching audience, whose mounting sense of oppressive foreboding can have no influence over the events unfolding in their gaze.
Certainly no walk in the park, Zoo Story is a bleak, challenging piece which will make you think twice the next time you’re people-watching from Nero’s on the High; watch your step, folks, and look out for one another, too.
