This short play has done well at Edinburgh since 2015 and is now finally being brought to London at the Barons Court Theatre.
It is a dystopian play which envisages a British government imposing a 140 word per day limit on every citizen. The play, centred around a couple, moves backwards and forwards in time, covering their relationship before and after the enactment of the draconian “hush law”.
I was kindly invited to the press night in my capacity as a blogger; not the very first time I have been asked but the very first time I have accepted such an invitation.
I thought both of the performances were excellent and the play well directed.
I can understand why aspiring performers and directors might want to work with this play. It provides an opportunity to show off their talents, not only with the use of words but also movement and non-verbal communication.
There are some very clever touches in the writing too. Sam Steiner clearly has a decent grasp of language and tempo for drama and comedy.
My problem, which I found insurmountable, was with the central conceit of the play. Not even our lousy political leaders nor the lousier nutters who aspire to lead, could conceivably enact and/or enforce a blanket law restricting speech in this way. The scenario, when set in a dystopia that looked and felt very much like now, was simply unbelievable.
I could have bought into a future surveillance society that tags, monitors and restricts the use of language amongst a subset of citizens who are deemed to have transgressed the law in some way. Some nations are not far from that today. But the blanket restriction on communication just seemed utterly implausible and impractical.
So, try as I might to sit back, go with the flow, suspend my disbelief and enjoy watching two very talented young performers…
…I found myself, Alan Partridge-like, constantly wondering, for example:
How does a government, that today cannot even persuade a reasonable proportion of its citizens to put smart energy meters in their homes, suddenly wire up every home and public space to police the number of words each citizen uses?
What happens if someone exceeds the word limit?
Are citizens fitted with chips to prevent them from speaking or are the cells full of verbal transgressors?
How do the very young and the demented fit in with this law?
Are you allowed to write anything down?
If rudimentary eye-contact communication is permitted, why not use actual sign language?
…and so forth.
Mark Ravenhill was sitting opposite me (Barons Court Theatre is a rather sweet and cosy three- sided affair in the basement of The Curtains Up pub). I couldn’t help wondering whether he too was going through such unwanted Partridgean thought processes. Ravenhill’s recent play The Cane, which I thought excellent, takes a scenario about corporal punishment well beyond likelihood, but not so implausibly as to be distracting from the drama.
The other excellent play that came to my mind was Constellations by Nick Payne, which did a very similar style of jumping backwards and forwards in time through short scenes. But the Nick Payne progressed the audiences understanding and the unfolding of a plot, cleverly, despite the constant time shifts. Lemons, unfortunately, felt to me like a series of repetitions that provided no additional enlightenment after about 30-40 minutes and no resolution to the story of the protagonists.
Nevertheless the scenario and the performances got me thinking quite a lot about the issues raised; in particular, at a micro level in the relationship. How the word limit became a bugbear in itself when the lovers returned from work with a large or tiny quota of words remaining for the day. Yet, in scenes from before the draconian law, the couple quite often didn’t want to talk about important matters anyway. And in one comedic scene, presumably a weekend day, they chose simply to waste their quota singing along with a recording of Baggy Trousers by Madness.
This did make me think about the genuine issue of scarcity in our lives and relationships which is, I would argue, time, not words. This parable about restricting the use of words is really a metaphor for the way we use and abuse our scarce time together in relationships.
Which is all good – all the more reason for me to baulk at the implausible scenario when the political and interpersonal points might have been made through a more plausible variant. My inner Partridge just cannot stop chirping about this.
Would I recommend this play/production. For sure, if you like to see fresh talent performing, this is well worth seeing. And if you can suspend belief better than I am able, then you might truly be bowled over by it.