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Sugar Snap
by Alex Cooke
Presented by Big Fish and Little Fish
Union Theatre
Director Suha Al-Khayyat
Designer Petra Storrs
Lighting and Sound designer Steve Miller
204 Union Street London SE1 OLX
Call +44 (0) 20 7261 9876 Tickets £8 - £12
Tues – Sat 7.30pm
Running time 2 hrs 10 mins with intermission
Through 13 Oct 2007
Does the Camera Lie?
If the Union Theatre wanted to name drop about its neighbours, it would boast of being in the same street as that big hitter, The Old Vic, now under the management of Kevin Spacey, the precocious Young Vic, and a stone’s throw from Shakespeare’s Globe. Hiding its light under an arch, The Union, long known to locals as ‘One of the most exciting spaces on the London Fringe’ – TimeOut London, it has been providing good theatrical fare for many years.
Writer, Alex Cooke, has provided all the ingredients for a heady mix of generations colliding, with each disapproving of the next’s mores and values. The homophobic father, Vic, Donald Elliot, his gay, talented, hardworking but stuck photographer son, Frazer, David McGillivray, and Richard, Alec Parkinson, the son and spitting image of his former lover, providing as complex a set of relationships as anyone could handle. Add the mother of the boy, Angela, Linda Robertson, and Fraser’s current boyfriend, Mark, Anthony Wise, and we are almost at soap opera levels of story lining. Are you still in love, or confused by the memory of love? Do you desire the young man in front of you, or are you deceived and tormented by the memory of having loved (and been dumped by) his father? Will he trust you when you can hardly trust yourself? Are you ever going to find out?
With a sensitive eye and ear for the truth of the piece, director Suha Al-Khayyat kept the action moving along. The attractive, traverse design set by Petra Storrs allowed the actors, in highly committed performances, to focus on each other at all times, and heightened the sense of all the relationships being tested to destruction.
There wasn’t much of the optimist about the writer’s vision. Once the energy of youth fades into disillusion, it seems, life’s ironies easily risk becoming life’s tragedies. Where the essential humour, bitter or sweet, in the piece forced its way out, the play rose to a real level of insight, sweeping self consciousness away in the entertainment value to be had from the abrasions caused by the parties’ effect on each other.
Although having been writing and directing for his company, Big Fish, for ten years, this is Alex Cooke’s first play for adults to be produced. Director, Suha Al Khayyat is a stalwart of Big Fish, and it is to be hoped that the muddy waters of commercial reality does not deter the two of them from taking the plunge again. A company to watch.
Recommended
Saul Reichlin
London correspondent
Talk Theatre in Chicago Podcast
www.ChicagoCritic.com
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