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Show: You Stupid Darkness!
Society: Cellar Door Theatre Company
Venue: Lantern Arts Centre
Credits: Sam Steiner
Type: Sardines
Author: Caroline Jenner
Performance Date: 23/06/2023
You Stupid Darkness!
Caroline Jenner | 24 Jun 2023 15:51pm
Sam Steiner’s You Stupid Darkness is set over five Tuesdays in Brightline’s call centre, where four volunteers: Frances, Joey, Angie and Jon, arrive in gas masks to respond in Samaritan style to desperate callers, whilst outside bridges and trees collapse, mould chokes buildings , lights go out and water and smog are an ever growing problem, eventually even seeping into their office.
However, apart from passing comments and occasional set changes the nature of the apocalypse that appears to be taking place is extremely nebulous. Joey says he hasn’t seen a pregnant person for five years, the kettle randomly explodes, yet this world doesn’t feel particularly different to our own. The volunteers appear to do pretty ordinary things: bring in biscuits, eat doughnuts, shop for snacks, make coffee, take calls from perverts, bicker. What they never really seem to do is engage with the fact that the end of the world is about to take place outside the door. And there are anachronisms. Despite all the chaos outside and failing power the landlines seem to still work. They appear to be able to breathe normally in a rather dank and gloomy office, sweet treats are readily available. In fact in many ways it doesn’t feel that different to how we live now. The world isn’t ending with a bang, but seems to be just fizzling out in a rather illogical fashion. Remove all the apocalyptic references and the play would still work as a snapshot of four disparate people thrown together once a week: pregnant Frances, a mother figure, who treats the 17 year old Joey like a surrogate son. Jon, who is having issues with his husband, Andy, and over talkative Angie who lives with her dog; four volunteers who we quickly discover are as insecure as their clients.
In addition there is also the danger inherent with setting your scene somewhere like a call centre. Your characters become extremely repetitive. However hard you try you have the same four people with the same hang ups answering phones in scenes where you will always only hear one side of the conversation. Despite an attempt to make this more interesting by having a number of characters answering phones at the same time, trying to listen to the jumble of words, is more effort than it’s worth, with all the conversations being fairly indecipherable. Despite this there are points when the simplicity of a moment works and we are given episodes that are gripping in their sensitivity: Jon asks Frances if she regrets getting pregnant, Angie desperately tries to stop a caller from passing out, Joey reads out his glaringly honest personal statement, Jon describes his lonely camping trip. It is these vignettes that stay with the audience, four ordinary people who don’t always get on, but are giving up their time to help others.
Finton McCluskey’s gawky Joey has a hesitation in his performance which we see develop into a growing confidence and sensitivity over the five Tuesdays and is effectively off set against Jake Figgin’s Jon, whose unhappiness and failing marriage simmers superbly under the surface of all his conversations.
Joanna Arber plays the annoyingly chirpy Frances beautifully, desperate to keep up everyone’s spirits she is constantly building up her team until the point when even she has to gives in to her frustration with a pervert on the line forcefully demanding “Why can’t you just be polite,” before putting down the receiver.
However it is Aneira Evans as the waffling Angie who steals the show with her constant personal revelations, descriptions of the creation of the tissue box and wonderful sense of timing as she becomes aware of others waiting for her to finish a call, which all too often has become more about herself than the caller.
These strong performances do much to maintain the focus of a piece that needs to be pruned down to give it greater pace and energy. The set, a mish mash of tables and chairs, tatty posters with vacuous words of inspiration, motivational ‘words of the week’ and shabby detritus is over cluttered for such a small stage. A door opening inwards, a coat stand and a trombone all clustered in one corner mean that people stumble over props and mask each other at key points. Placing the coat stand on the other side of the stage, a smaller table at the back, a door that opens the other way, the trombone along the wall not jutting out into the room –any number of minor adjustments would avoid scenes being so focused in one corner and people tripping themselves up.
There is no definitive ending to resolves this show, because Steiner has created a scenario rather than a story and therein lies the problem, a situation that plays to the comedy and tragedy of everyday life but disappoints by failing to deliver any tangible dramatic legacy.