A Bruising Night At the Theatre: Cougar by Rose Lewenstein, Orange Tree Theatre, 2 February 2019

We booked to see the Saturday preview of this one more or less as soon as it was announced – it looked right up our street from the rubric – click here for that rubric.

Sort of chamber play, sort of about big global issues, some top quality, familiar (to us) names in the cast and crew…

…not least Chelsea Walker whose work as a director had impressed us recently with Yous Two at the Hampstead Studio and Low Level Panic at the Orange Tree – click here or below for the former which includes a link to the latter:

Yous Two by Georgia Christou, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 20 January 2018

One thing I had forgotten about Yous Two was our beef about the set and the resulting sight lines. Strangely, that indifference to audience concerns was replicated in the set of Cougar.

The designer, Rosanna Vize, has designed the sets for a great many plays we have seen recently, as a click through to her Ogblog tab reveals. Her sets are always imaginative and only occasionally impede the audience – in the case of Cougar both physically and visually. The ushers asked us not to walk on the set as we entered the auditorium, but we needed either to walk on the set or stomp on a couple of audience members in one or two places – we went for the set.

Back to the play – here is the trailer:

The play is basically about an increasingly chaotic, globe-trotting relationship between a forty-something woman who is a big cheese, professional environmental expert and her twenty-something lover/paramour. It is a short piece – about 75 minutes long.

An interesting and intriguing play in many ways. The power woman comes across as a rather one-dimensional monster at times, yet her self-centred, ego-fuelled behaviours would seem less monstrous and more nuanced if the gender roles were reversed.

The cross-over between the global issues around climate change and the domestic issues of excessive consumption of resources (real and emotional) pervaded the piece rather well. The short scenes jumping forwards and backwards in time seemed more like a device to maintain the sense of chaos and confusion than an essential structural device for the (straightforwardly linear) story.

If we were being hyper-critical, Janie and I agreed that the female role is perhaps over-written and the male role under-written. Rose Lewenstein more or less owns up to that in the interesting programme interview. Well acted by Charlotte Randle and especially Mike Noble.

Anyway – amongst all this – why have I described the experience as bruising, I hear you cry?

Well, in one chaotic scene, the young man smashes a camera, which I imagine is supposed to break on the stage but not spray everywhere…but spray it did – with the lens (an 18mm-55mm beastie, seeing as you asked)…

…flying at me, striking me on the shin. Ouch.

A few minutes later, in another chaotic scene, the young man who has a couple of walk-on, walk-off moments (I assume Ryan Laden, who is thanked in the programme) ran off the stage in the dark, crunching into the same leg as he ran. Ouch again.

Janie wondered if I was OK. I felt a bit like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Tis but a scratch”…

…although my equivalent phrase was, “Tis nothing – I play hard ball sports”.

When we got home after the show (and after dinner at Don Fernandos) Janie offered to put some arnica on my bruises.

Oh, that is a big bruise…

…said Janie, admiring a bruise on my left leg.

That’s one I picked up playing real tennis last week. The new bruises are on the right leg,

I said.

I’m sure the cast and crew will work on those production issues between now and press night. It would be well worth going to see this play/production if you read this piece in time – it runs until 2 March 2019. Perhaps best not to book the front row for this one, though, unless you are as brave as The Black Night or a Mountain Lion (Cougar).